>Doug, you are obsessed with numerical trends and sometimes disregard
>qualitative trends.
-Sometimes, maybe, but not always. But in this case, the numerical -trends are hard to argue with.
Yet I did, by noting that under Reagan-Bush, total union membership declined absolutely by over 1.3 million union members, while union membership was basically stable during the Clinton era.
That is a dramatic difference that your choice of the union density statistic obscured.
Having a Democratic President did not make a massive difference in helping unions organize MORE members to keep up with expanding employment in the economy, but it did prevent the massive LOSS in members that occurred during the active assault on unions that was assisted by the Reagan-Bush administrations.
A statistic that obscures that difference is a bad statistic.
-- Nathan Newman