Ilana DeBare, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, January 29, 1999
Labor unions gained 87,000 new members in California in 1998 the first time in nearly a decade that the unionized share of the state's workforce expanded.
AFLCIO officials said yesterday that 16.1 percent of California's approximately 14 million workers were union members last year, up slightly from 16 percent in 1997.
Labor leaders said the slight increase is a sign that their movement is on the rise after years of decline.
``This is the first step on a long staircase,'' said Sharon Cornu, spokeswoman for the California Labor Federation. ``The labor movement is reorganizing and restructuring to be a lean, mean organizing machine.''
But opponents of organized labor downplayed the significance of the rise.
``I haven't seen any evidence of a trend that unions' efforts at revitalization have been successful on a large scale,'' said David Durham, managing partner of the San Francisco office of Littler Mendelson, a law firm representing employers in labor disputes. ``It's too early to tell if this is a trend or an aberration.''
Union membership has been on a steady decline both in California and nationally for about two decades.
On a national level, union membership has fallen from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 13.9 percent in 1998.
And in California, union membership dropped from 21.9 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 16 percent in 1997.
While the actual number of union members rose during some of those years, California's population grew by an even larger margin leading to continued declines in the unionized portion of the workforce.
Since taking office in 1995, AFLCIO President John Sweeney has pledged to reverse this decline by promoting an aggressive focus on organizing new members.
With 87,000 new recruits last year, California unions added far more members than those in any other state.
Some observers said the increase in California union membership had the same roots as labor's successful political fight last year against Proposition 226.
Proposition 226 which was voted down by voters last June would have placed limits on labor's ability to use members' dues for political campaigns.
(c) 1999 San Francisco Chronicle
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[COMMENT by Michael Eisenscher]
The 87,000 member gain in CA must be gross not net gain, because in the entire U.S., the labor movement had a net gain of only 101,000. To achieve that gain, 373,000 were organized, of whom 213,000 were new public sector members. Losses due to layoffs, closures, down-sizing, and decertifications account for the smaller net gain. 126,000 union members were lost in manufacturing alone.