Wotjek>...It fits the trend. Union membership is steady declining since 1983 - it dropped another 0.4 percentage point in 2004 http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm.
Of course, we can speculate about possible reasons of that decline - hostile legal environment, capitalist propaganda, intimidation, etc. My favorite explanation is that there is little pride and status related to being "working class" - everybody wants to be a "professional" - a professional truck driver, a professional janitor, a professional sales clerk aka "associate." Union membership, otoh, involves identification with the working class and its ideals - and fee people want to do that.
Last week read the first few chapters of, "The Dignity of Working Men Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration, " by Michèle Lamont. Based on interviews with 150 self-identified white and Black working class men in the U.S.A. plus 150 French workers. The great majority expressed strong class consciousness, hostility to professional-managerial class and pride in work under stressful, repetitive shitty conditions. and strong bonds with extended family, church, neigborhood, community contrasted with individualistic motivations and cold emotional style of PMC.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LAMDIG.html
> ...2000 C. Wright Mills Award sponsored by the C. Wright Mills Award
> Committee of the Society for the Study of Social Problems
Michèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men--the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society.
Morality is at the center of these workers' worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the "disciplined self" and blacks on the "caring self." Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined.
This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as "part of us" and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different "moral offenders" in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of "cultural membership" that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.
-- Michael Pugliese