AFL-CIO: enemy of caribou

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Aug 8 05:50:47 PDT 2001


Nathan Newman wrote:


>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>>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.

It'd take more sophisticated econometrics than I can do, but you're forgetting that the Reagan years were also a time of massive manufacturing job losses, unlike the Clinton years, and manufacturing was disproportionately unionized. At the end of Ron's term, mfg E was down 4%; at the end of Bill's, it was up 2% (wasn't Nafta supposed to destroy all those mfg jobs?).

Your use of absolute numbers rather than density reminds me of those Republican budgeteers who try to prove that budget cuts aren't really cuts at all because the nominal dollar amount of spending was up. I guess nominal union counts are important if you're a union president wanting to maximize the dues flow, but if you're interested in working class power, than the density numbers are more important.

Doug



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