Without a strong union movement in the private sector, a critical balance in the market has been lost. No wonder labor’s share of national income has fallen to lows not seen since statistics began being kept in the late 1940s.
My father, uncle and grandfather were union men. I was a union member and, as a manager, supervised union employees. But this is an increasingly rare experience for Americans.
As we prepare to celebrate Labor Day, unions last year represented only 6.7 percent of private-sector workers. Public-sector membership is much higher, but accounts for only 4.5 percent of the national workforce.
In the mid-1950s, union membership — most of it in the private sector — peaked at 35 percent of all workers.
Unions helped lift the middle class, and changes in the workplace won by union efforts — and sometimes union blood — benefited all Americans. For one thing, employers raised wages and improved conditions to keep workers from unionizing. No wonder a study released last week showed that the decline of unions has hurt nonunion wages and added to widening inequality.
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Yet today many Americans vocally dislike organized labor — as the comments to this column will no doubt reveal.
This antipathy is especially prevalent in the South. The nation’s lowest unionization rate is in South Carolina, where Boeing put a second Dreamliner assembly (2.1 percent compared with a national average of 11.1 percent). Washington’s stood at 16.8 percent last year. These figures include public-sector workers.
Beyond the loudest voices, perceptions are more nuanced. According to a Pew Research Center poll taken last year, 45 percent of respondents said the decline of organized labor was a mostly bad thing while 43 percent saw it as mostly good.
The poll found that 48 percent had a favorable view of unions, with 39 percent unfavorable. Interestingly, 48 percent stated a favorable impression of corporations, while 43 percent saw them unfavorably.
On Planet Seattle, one would think America is in a progressive realignment partly led by organized labor. Unions were instrumental in the push for the $15 minimum wage.
But Seattle and other deep-blue cities are not in harmony with much of America (or even Washington state). One of President Obama’s campaign pledges was to institute “card check,” which would make it easier for workers to form unions. The bill died in Congress facing millions spent by business in opposition.
How did we get to this moment, with labor so enfeebled on Labor Day?
It didn’t happen with one stroke. President Reagan, the only former union leader to serve as chief executive, broke the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. It unleashed a wave of union busting. But the decline of organized labor began earlier and has complex causes.
Immediately after World War II, walkouts hit major industries. Unions had settled for modest contracts during the conflict out of patriotic duty. With the guns silent, their members were facing inflation and they expected raises. President Truman, a Democrat, was incensed against labor. At one point, he threatened to induct striking workers into the armed forces.
The unpopularity of the strikes led to passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 (over Truman’s veto). It rolled back some organized-labor gains from the New Deal and restricted unions on several fronts.
Despite vetoing Taft-Hartley, Truman used its enforcement tools several times. Despite having his name on the bill, Republican Sen. Robert Taft later had misgivings that the legislation might have gone too far. Such was American ambivalence over unions, even then.
Taft-Hartley was never repealed.
Another cause of union decline was changes in American industry.
Membership continued to climb in the 1950s (and the AFL-CIO was a stalwart anti-communist organization). Unions thrived in sectors such as railroads, mining and giant plants making steel and automobiles.
By the energy crisis of the early 1970s, the backbone auto industry was in trouble. Detroit’s gas-guzzlers, look-alike models and poor quality faced popular Japanese imports. In this case, management and labor leaders cooperated in the sleepwalking, as David Halberstam documented in his powerful 1986 book, “The Reckoning.”
This was repeated in other sectors with different refrains, but the outcomes were the same: lost union jobs.
Meanwhile, the American economy shifted into services and high technology, which were less fertile ground for union organizers.
Much of big business, which successfully fended off most organizing until the 1930s, never reconciled itself to unions. In 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell drafted a memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Among its goals was an agenda to roll back the “attack on the American free-enterprise system.”
It urged business to take direct action against unions in the political arena and the courts. The Powell memo became the founding document of a multibillion-dollar conservative effort to win political advantage. Unions, reeling from losses, couldn’t match it. The result was decades of anti-union policy and court rulings.
Organized labor hurt itself beyond unpopular strikes and the cozy anti-customer attitude with management of the Big Three automakers. Corruption was a scourge of many union locals and, in the case of the Teamsters until the 1990s, entire unions.
But to be fair, when I covered the auto industry in the late 1980s, some of the best ideas for improving efficiency and productivity came from the United Auto Workers.
Finally, globalization, deregulation and plants moving to “right to work” states savaged the last bastions of high-paid union labor. Boeing’s workforce in the Puget Sound region is one of the outliers, but even these unions have been forced to make concessions.
In a way, unions were victims of their own success. Members moved their families into the middle class, and after a generation their children gravitated more to anti-union Republican politics.
But without a strong union movement in the private sector, a critical balance in the market has been lost. No wonder labor’s share of national incomehas fallen to lows not seen since statistics began being kept in the late 1940s.
Some victories for organized labor have happened recently, including in services. But unions face a long road back.