Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>I remember at the beginning of the decade, pretty serious pro-labor
analysts
>were predicting a complete collapse of the unions in the 1990s. One guy I
>knew, who headed the California state labor commission under Jerry Brown,
>back when it was pretty hard-core pro-union, with sad confidence wrote
>articles predicting a union density of 5% by the year 2000.
-That's a bit alarmist. At the Reagan rate of decline, we'd hit 5% in -2029; at the Clinton rate of decline, we'd get a reprieve from the 5% -figure until 2047!
Doug, you are obsessed with numerical trends and sometimes disregard qualitative trends. During the 80s, unions essentially lost unionization in whole industries and whole cities-- a city might lose every unionized hotel in a single strike, meaning that a unionization comeback became largely impossible for the foreseeable future. Deindustrialization, plant closures and total union organizing paralysis killed off unions across the country. If that had continued, the whole union movement could have collapsed.
In the 1990s, some of that erosion continued but somewhat levelled off, mostly because of better organizing but somewhat because of better labor policy from the Feds. Instead of losing whole cities in employer-provoked strikes, unions began to make small but real organizing gains and membership stayed basically level in numerical terms. Unfortunately, industry attrition of union jobs and growth outpaced organizing, so union density could not keep up.
But the reasons for the fall in union density between the two decades was qualitatively different. I couldn't get a table with the numbers from the first couple of years of Reagan, when there was a savage decline in union membership, but note from 1983 to 1992 there was a 1.35 million absolute membership decline in unions. With a few small upticks and downticks, (including a 500,000 uptick in membership in the first two Clinton years), total union membership was basically pretty level for the whole decade.
Relative union density is a useful number for some purposes, but it also disguises quite radical differences between what happened to unions in the 80s versus the 90s.
UNION MEMBERSHIP IN THE U.S.
YEAR Members* % in union 2000 16,258 13.5 1999 16,477 13.9 1998 16,211 13.9 1997 16,110 14.1 1996 16,269 14.5 1995 16,360 14.9 1994 16,740 15.5 1993 16,598 15.7 1992 16,390 15.7 1991 16,568 16.0 1990 16,740 16.0 1983 17,717 20.1
Number from DOL