Yes.
Is density down? Sure. But that's mostly in industries where many of the jobs have disappeared, or the unions were already so dysfunctional that the workers barely notice the difference-- and therefore decertified them. But organizing has picked up in a bunch of economic sectors, particularly the service sector. When I was an organizer in HERE, they had not organized a new hotel from the bottom-up in something like fifteen years. Now, they regularly organize new hotels and while they may not be improving density across the country as a whole, they are definitely improving it within many cities. And in health care and building services, SEIU has obviously made great strides in strengthening the power of workers.
And the comparison does have to be where things would have been without some of the better new organizing, since the trajectory was one of plummeting during the 1980s. Total union membership peaked at 22,207,000 million union members in 1975, plateaued for about five years, then went into freefall during the Reagan-Bush years, falling to 16,390,000 million members by 1992. Since then, toal union membership has basically held even, with total union membership at 16,275,000 million members.
It would have been great to massively increase the number of members and therefore not drop in overall union density, but it's a lot better than where things seemed to be heading. I remember the head of the UC-Berkeley Labor Center back in the early 1990s was sadly but confidently predicting that union density would be 5% by the year 2000.
As for politics, the unions are infinitely smarter about their political work. In fact, they are doing far less giving to Democrats and far more giving to their own institutions, like Working America and Americans Coming Together. If you want to see a "Labor Party" in operation, look at those institutions, run by labor officials, mobilizing at the grassroots, registering people to vote, and planning to turn them out to vote at the direction of these labor-dominated institutions. You may disagree with their choice of candidates to support, but they are unquestionably labor-led institutions doing the political organizing.
And what is also different is what they are demanding from politicians they support. Increasingly, they are asking not just for good votes in Congress but direct support for labor organizing, whether it's marching the picket line or helping directly pressure bad employers.
I spent the last three days at the Lawyers Coordinating Committee, the AFL-CIO lawyers network, and it was fascinating hearing all the strategies different unions are engaging in, from regulatory tactics to mobilizing pension funds in the post-Enron world to supporting new organizing through new pressures on subcontractors. I remember the labor world of 1988 when I first became an organizer-- lots of innovation was not how anyone would describe the labor world back then. Now, you had rooms of hundreds of people sharing the newest creative idea on how to fight back.
Yes, it's brutal to organize out there and success is like pulling the proverbial teeth, but at the most basic experiential basis, it's like night and day out there. The labor movement may be smaller as a percentage of the workforce, but it is smarter and more aggressive than it was in the 1980s by orders of magnitude.
I have great confidence that the labor movement will revive itself to greater strength, something that was less clear a few years ago. Some of the unions seem determined to become retirement homes for their older members, so density will continue to fall in those industries. But in others, I fully expect to see great gains in coming years.
-- Nathan Newman