Where have all the union members gone?

Union members used to make up between 35 and 40 percent of the private-sector workforce; now, according to most estimates, fewer than one in 13 private-sector workers is in a union.

That sharp decline offers as good an explanation as any for what has happened to middle-class wages over the last four decades.

So, rebuilding the labor movement would seem to be key to rebuilding our economy, leveling wages and improving the lots of those who do the work.

How to do that? Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas but not a lot of unity among unions and even less of a favorable atmosphere among business or government.

Unions were hopeful that the Obama administration would bring with it a new union-friendly approach. But it has done relatively little to improve the ability of workers to organize. Card check — the chief reform sought by the major unions — appears dead, at least for now. And rather than using the government’s new stake in the auto industry to bring unions to the table, to empower workers, the administration attacked them, forcing a renegotiation of contracts and making the United Auto Workers the poster child for what the Detroit carmakers had been doing wrong.

The failure to reignite the union movement has surprised some, given the explosion of union growth during the 1030s. Fear, according to one North Jersey labor attorney, is partly to blame:

Nancy Erika Smith, a prominent labor union attorney, says she is “disheartened” by the “go it alone” attitude of many workers.

“Everyone seems so afraid to join together and help each other,” says Smith, whose office is in Montclair. “It’s a time when people should want to stick together.”

Contrast that with the Great Depression, for example, when hard times spawned labor aggressiveness — the founding of the United Auto Workers (1935), American Newspaper Guild (1933), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (1937), the predecessor of the Communications Workers of America (1938).

“Hard times drove people together to offer mutual protection,” she says.

Another North Jersey union leader, David McCann of the Service Employees International Union, points to a different kind of fear: Fear of change, especially as it revolves around race and the loss of privilege.

McCann sees the divisions over health care and other issues as surrogates for a much larger, if silent, fear. The fear of change represented by the election of a black man — “a black man with a funny name,” says McCann — to the presidency.

“A lot of this is code — this is racial. The election was easy, but now those with an interest in defeating this president are resorting to unsaid fears about change,” he says.

This may be true, but any analysis of that earlier period of union growth has to reflect the aggressive organizing that took place over the first three to four decades of the 20th century, the apathy that came with success and the impact that the red-baiting of the 1950s had on the radical critique that had been a staple of the earlier labor movement.

Union growth in the 1930s was not just a product of the economic times, but a culmination of the efforts of hundreds and thousands of workers demanding their rights and working to alter the one-sided social contract under which they lived.

Their success altered the definition of what it meant to be working class, with factory workers suddenly finding themselves earning middle-class wages and moving into quiet suburbs. One result was a shift in the labor movement from improving the lives of the laboring classes to a business unionism in which individual unions focused only on the lives and wages of their members, ignoring the organizing side and creating a disconnect.

When middle-class labor jobs started to disappear in the 1960s — at a time when minorities began to claim their own piece of the American dream — the movement crashed and burned. It was a two-decade process, but one that has left labor wandering in the desert.

So, don’t expect the bad times — or even card check — to reverse the losses. The labor movement has to begin to think of itself as a movement representing all workers again. It is going to be a painstaking process that will take the movement outside of its traditional industries to white-collar jobs and immigrant and minority communities.

Unfortunately, that means we’re still several years away from a real rebirth of labor in America.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet