Raymond Hogler is such a tease. His New Republic piece is titled “What’s Behind the Decline of American Unions?”:
In 1980, union membership density stood at 23 percent of the work force; some 40 years later, just over 11 percent of American workers belong to unions. During the same period, wealth inequality in the U.S. continued to accelerate largely on a social class basis.
but you’ll search the piece in vain for that. Even his antecedent piece doesn’t really offer an explanation. Maybe you need to read his book for an answer but, given his lack of explanations in two posts, I can’t hold out much hope for that.
Let me offer some potential explanations: deindustrialization, low margins and a slack labor market in service industries, bad union strategies, and an adverse regulatory environment for manufacturing.
Deindustrialization is the simplest, easiest explanation. That 23% of the work force in 1980? A lot of those were employed in heavy industry: auto manufacturing, steel mills, and the like. We don’t have nearly as much heavy industry as we used to through a combination of competition from overseas suppliers, self-destructive trade policy on our part, predatory monetary policies and domestic subsidies on the part of our foreign competitors, preference, and regulatory factors I’ll get to later.
Since the 1980s the emphasis in the labor movement has been on organizing service industries. The problem there is that they are not good prospects for unionization. There is a slack labor market for unskilled workers, largely but not solely a product of our failure to enforce our own immigration laws. In the hospitality and food service sectors, major employers of unskilled workers, margins are extremely low. That means they’d rather fire their workers and hire new ones than pay their workers more. I know of companies that’ve gone out of business in response to unionization of its work force.
The “commanding heights of the economy”, healthcare and finance, are not particularly good prospects for organization.
The predatory monetary policies and domestic subsidies on the part of Japan, South Korea, and China practically go without explanation. In essence by manipulating their currencies they’ve exported inexpensive goods to us and imported employment.
For the last 30 years the labor movement has been fighting a delaying action. It’s been trying to preserve existing jobs, wages, and benefits at the expense of future jobs, wages, and benefits. The apogee of that was in the deal that GM’s workers cut for a tiered wage system.
Finally, environmental, energy, health and safety regulations, reporting requirements, and so on discourage American companies from employing workers in heavy industry. The United States used to produce most of the rare earth elements produced anywhere in the world. Now we produce very little, importing most of what we use from China. It’s not because we ran out; we’ve stopped producing them because of environmental regulations.
Note that I’m not arguing that the regulations are bad. I’m just pointing out that they have secondary effects.
If you read Mr. Hogler’s articles, you’ll be left with the impression that the labor movement needed life support in the form of supportive legislation in order to prosper. Is that really prospering? I think there’s a lot more to it than that.
The irony of organized labor’s decline is that the Democrats, notionally the patrons and beneficiaries of organized labor, have supported all of the ill-considered and self-destructive policies that have brought it to its present circumstances. That’s the reason for the title of this post.
And to dovetail with a blogpost made recently, a minor edit:
The irony of organized labor’s decline is that the Democrats, notionally the patrons (of organized labor bosses) and beneficiaries of organized labor, have supported all of the ill-considered and self-destructive policies that have brought it to its present circumstances.
Labor bosses behaving selfishly and shortsightedly, like, well, politicians. Who’d a thunk it?