[The yearly decline in union density is the sharpest in 20 years. The private sector rate is right on the trendline I computed last March, which goes to 0% in late 2031/early 2032 - a fact which contributed to Nathan Newman's signing off this list. The original BLS report is at <ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/union2.txt>.]
[WS:] I think this may happen even faster - as older workers start retiring. Do you have a comparable data for other countries handy?
Whether the declining union density is a bad thing depends, ultimately on what is happening in the labor market more generally. Unions, especially in this country, are primarily a blue collar phenomenon, i.e. defined primarily by blue collar cultural identity. Therefore, if the blue collar share of labor force declines, so does the union density.
It is not necessarily a bad thing, if unions are being replaced by new forms of labor organizing that are more appealing to white collar, professional workers, and if those new forms have a more progressive (if not left-wing) orientation than the unions (which in many respects have been pretty conservative). So the question, therefore, is "does the declining union density mean decline of labor's political influence or merely transformation of that influence i.e. channeling it through different organizational forms?
I think that what we see is more of a transformation than a net loss, but I would like to know what others think.
Wojtek