Very true- one reason I like Clinton more than Carter.
>(2) If the Reagan-Bush years are the era of neoliberal medicine, the
>Clinton years are the era of neoliberal recovery (which has come to
>an end now) -- the era of recovery in which AFL-CIO failed to reverse
>the decline in union density.
Well, if you were around the union movment in the early 90s, there were a lot of folks looking at trends from the 80s expecting that union density would fall to 5% by the 2000. There was a significant pickup in successful union organizing, which prevented losses in total membership but density fell.
If you look at total membership, you get a better idea of why the 1980s felt like hell-on-earth for unions, because their absolute numbers were plummeting. While union density peaked in the 1950s, the total number of union members peaked in 1975 at 22.2 million union members.
This dipped slightly to 20.9 million by 1980 as the first anti-union assaults began and deindustrialization began to hit the midwest. As I've said, I think economic trends were more important than political or legal trends and Kirkland sure had no clue how to respond in the period.
By 1992, however, total union membership had plunged to 16.4 million members. That number basically stayed the same in the 1990s, ending just a bit lower at 16.3 million members in 2000.
But this included the organizing of many new members to make up for the loss of membership in older industrialized unions, which was the key to stemming the loss in total membership.
Union density is sometimes a deceptive number since unions can't control the total number of jobs, since they have a hard enough time dealing with the workplace-by-workplace organizing. And the fact remains that given employer opposition, use of replacement workers (rare before 1982) and other tactics, it has become far harder to organize. So the success in the 1990s feels like a relative gain for unions compared to the 1980s.
Bush's NLRB is already starting to issue harsher and nastier decisions that are making organizing harder.
-- Nathan Newman