I was taken aback by Robert Samuelson’s claim in his most recent column:
Labor’s fall has been stunning. In 2010, unions represented 6.9 percent of private-sector workers. That’s lower than the 12 percent in 1929, before passage of the 1935 Wagner Act – the National Labor Relations Act – which gave workers the right to organize and required employers to recognize unions that won a secret ballot.
Many theories explain this collapse: greater management pushback and intimidation; business expansion in anti-union regions, the South and West; more white-collar office workers and fewer blue-collar factory workers. All these theories contain some truth, but unions’ downfall mainly reflected their inability to adapt to change.
the emphasis is mine. As a matter of logic for “management pushback and intimidation” to be a significant cause of the reduction in union membership today relative to 1929 wouldn’t there need to be more of such pushback and intimidation during the periods of union decline than there was during the period of union growth?
I have wracked my brain for evidence of greater pushback and intimidation in the 1970s and 1980s, the period of private sector unionization’s greatest decline, than there was in the 1920s or 1930s, the period of its greatest increase, but to no avail. I just can’t find incidents like the Columbine Mine Massacre of 1927 during which unarmed striking miners were gunned down with machine guns by mine guards, the Ford Hunger March of 1932 (not technically a strike, I confess) in which four demonstrators were killed and 22 wounded by the gunfire of the Dearborn police and Ford security guards (after they’d been attacked with tear gas), or the 1934 West Coast longshoremen’s strike in which two were killed and more wounded by police gunfire. The closest would be the Hormel meatpackers’ strike of 1985 which, although it was punctuated by picketers rioting against strikebreakers crossing the picket line, concluded after 10 months with the material effect of breaking the union there. Meatpacking in the upper Midwest has gone from being a well-compensated job to a job “Americans won’t do”, with many of the workers new immigrants, some illegal.
I just don’t see the evidence. Contrariwise, I think that private unions have declined due to the other factors mentioned by Mr. Samuelson, to which I would add professional labor leadership (the example of which I would cite would be Lane Kirkland) and the collapse of the economic conditions that allowed private sector union members to be compensated, temporarily, at rates higher than the market clearing price for their labor. This collapse was brought about by the opening of China, globalization, increased immigration, technology, and any number of other factors.
To bring back the glory days of private sector trade unionism in the 1950s and 1960s you’d need to return to the conditions that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s and it’s hard for me to see a swell of support for that. They really weren’t so glorious.
The whole thing is weird. I can still visualize some of the pro-labor union editorials from high school history books — depictions of fat men with big cigars and money falling out of their pockets, laughing as emaciated workers trudge to the coal mine.
Today, Illinois has to hide from public unions to cap pension benefits for salaries over $106,000 and raise the retirement age above 55.
I think this brings up a critical point, PD. What would need to happen to be able to support a large body of public employees who are in the top quintile of income earners? You could support a small cadre of them but not 20% of the workforce as it is now.
That either implies a lot more taxation of those in the top 10% or higher of income earners or a ceiling on the earnings on public employees regardless of their qualifications, value, etc. or both.
Another critical point is that those hardworking private sector workers still exist—there are just a lot fewer of them now and if they go on strike there’s a line of guys willing to work for less.