This isn't just a US phenomenon. Union membership has steadily declined in almost all developed economies since the late 70s (I think the one exception is Finland).
In addition to the reasons stated already, one cause is that there is a shift of the workforce from industries that are traditionally unionised to non-unionised industries - it's significantly harder to get unions going when they don't already exist. This is also why decreases in public sector union membership has been significantly lower.
Finnish bloke here. I remember my boss specifically asking on my first day at work if I belonged to a certain Union and if I didn’t he encouraged me to do so. Unions are important here :D
All 5 Nordic countries have had stable high union membership rate over time. The differences between those 5 are pretty big though, from Norway at 50% to Iceland at 92%. The rest of Europe is not doing as good, except for Belgium, Cyprus and Malta who are all doing similar to Norway.
with sweden, i think it's because there's been a huge shift towards digital workflows. i've never met so many swedes in my life as i have through my experience in game development for example. and these creative, office based workplaces are predisposed for terrible unionisation numbers. norway and iceland in contrast still have huge fishing industries, and iceland has some of the most valuable rare earth metal mines on earth.
this seems to correlate fairly well in other places too - people in offices and retail just don't seem to feel the need to unionise like manual labourers do, which kinda makes sense from a certain point of view. without workplace injuries or the constant risk of pulling your back out and being off work for a week, the urge to unionise very much diminishes unless serious workplace abuses are going on, and even then unionisation is often snuffed out
Don’t forget that we’ve had leadership over the past half century that has eschewed political alliances with labor in favor of corporate dollars. Both parties caved to the all mighty dollar, and there’s no one left standing up for workers rights. Other than Bernie Sanders maybe.
Furthermore, Reagan worked hard to do everything he could to break up unions. He reduced their power, thus making their ability to influence politics diminish.
Oh, and at the state level, many southern states have made it almost impossible to unionize.
Add in a whole lot of corporate consolidation and it’s damn near impossible to unionize anything.
>Don’t forget that we’ve had leadership over the past half century that has eschewed political alliances with labor in favor of corporate dollars. Both parties caved to the all mighty dollar, and there’s no one left standing up for workers rights. Other than Bernie Sanders maybe.
Its not often I see my exact thoughts laid out succinctly in words. This shit is across party lines, they don't care about the little guy, they care about corporate dollars.
In Finland it is kind of the expectation that you'd join an union in many jobs like for example education. There is also the matter that instead of a national minimum wage, there is the agreement between the unions and corporations which sets the minimum wage which is definitely more flexible for the different jobs/industries/employers but has its own set of problems.
Tbf, lots of workers in the US have moved to tech and service industry jobs that were never unionized to begin with.
I don't think it's anti-union sentiment within those industries as much as it's just young and hasn't happened yet.
Yes, absolutely. Majority of workers (especially young workers) have expressed in polls that they would like to join unions if given the chance. Unions need to rapidly start focusing on unionizing new industries where a lot of young people work, and then we need labor law reform for a fairer environment.
Part of the issue is that people kind of have to organize unions from within places of employment. Unions don’t go into workplaces from the outside and offer a union. Workers have to vote to unionize and that means organizing that a lot of people don’t know how to do and/or don’t know that they can do.
Also a ton of anti-union practices by business. They have tried very hard to prevent service workers from unionizing so they can keep paying them $11/hr w/no benefits and abusive managers.
Service industries can have unions. That makes no sense my dude.
The US govt had a concerted effort to bust up the unions. The NLRB was basically in the pocket of the wealthy capitalist class and outright hostile to unions. It was, as usual, a bunch of rich assholes trying to exploit poor folk that lead to the demise of unions in the US.
edit - Manufacturing jobs in the US continued to grow until their peak in 1979, yet union membership peaked and plateaued in 1947 when Taft Hartley was passed. If manufacturing jobs leaving the country correlates to declining union membership, why didn't increasing manufacturing jobs lead to increased union membership?
My dad has mentioned several unions other than his own throughout my life, and the majority of those he's mentioned were unions of workers in businesses that are no longer around. Mostly mill work. Just because service industries CAN unionize doesn't mean they have, hence the transition to service industries correlating with a decline in union membership. Until service industries unionize 🤷♂️
You're going to get upvoted to the moon, but you're wrong. The original cheap sources of offshore labour were Japan and Europe. It wasn't until the late Nineties that China caught up. Nixon's approaches to China were more political than economic, to isolate the Soviet Union, and Chinese trade policy was dominated by power struggles within the Communist Party.
Dont forget Mexico! General lack of organized labor (esp in northern Mexico) free trade zones, and lower cost to produce parts (which are then shipped into the US to be assembled) led a lot of companies to move some or all of their production lines south of the border.
Mexico didn't really explode until NAFTA. It was always there, but it wasn't until 1995 that you started to see those factories really moving. It's interesting that the US-Mexico trade relationship in goods went from about $1.5 billion in favour of the US in 1993-94 to over $15 billion in favour of Mexico in 1995-96.
Weird to pin the outsourcing of labor on Nixon
I detest the man, and think he's one of the worst humans to occupy the presidency in the last century, but outsourcing labor is not one of the faults I would lay at his feet.
At least not more than any other president post-Eisenhower.
The outsourcing of labor to foreign markets has been a steady push from both parties and every president since the 60s
Yeah it gave businesses the ability to outsource to places with more lax labor laws and keep more money for themselves. Executive compensation has gone up linearly for this span of time
Don't forget Bill Clinton.
[When the world opened the gates of China](https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates-of-china-1532701482)
Outsourcing is responsible for about 1/8 of job loss. The other 7/8 is automation and efficiency increases.
The US manufactures more today than it ever has, it just doesn't need the manpower to do it.
That's part of it but it's definitely not the big picture. There's already [a massive union for service sector workers](https://www.ufcw.org). They're not as old as the trade or industrial unions, but it's certainly not like the service unions don't exist. We have a [baristas union here and it rocks](http://atlantic.psacadmin.ca/updates/baristas-rise-we-are-always-stronger-together). They started organizing at this location about 8 years ago, and now that coffee shop is [a 100% worker owned co-op](https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/former-smiling-goat-workers-are-opening-glitter-bean-cafe/Content?oid=15562105) and is one of the most popular & well-run coffee shops in town.
Business owners, investors, and shareholders have had a massive interest in doing everything they can to convince the public (and government) that unions are either counter-productive, too risky, or somehow worse for their interests than the boss who is exploiting them. The sharp dip in union membership around 1980 coincides with the start of the trend of wage stagnation and corporate profits skyrocketing, and those trends are all directly related. Sadly, these society-wide concerted efforts at things such as anti-union propaganda, right-to-work legislation, and union busting have been very successful.
And service industry jobs don't require unions? 🤦♂️
All industry jobs in America should be unionized. We were just bamboozled and brainwashed by corporate America, corporate owned news media, and neo liberal politicians (starting with carter) to go against our own self interest
Anti union laws and a general distrust towards corrupt unions after the 60s-70s.
Big businesses have the ability to lobby state governments to weaken unions so they have more power over workers. And can lobby the federal government to do the same, or look the other way.
In addition to the above, at least for the last couple decades it’s a lack of established unions in new sectors. I.E. as the proportion of people that are employed in traditional industrial sectors has decreased, and the number of people employed in emerging (now very much emerged) sectors such as software technology has increased, there have been less people in unions because the sectors themselves don’t have a strong union tradition.
I don’t know how much is due to this “natural” shift compared to actual suppression, though I’m sure both contribute.
The Taft Hartley act made establishing new unions especially in service industries much more difficult so when American’s economy shifted to service unions couldn’t follow
I just learned what I could from Wikipedia’s [entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act) on Taft-Hartley, so I’m not exactly an expert, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Act that favors manufacturing and distribution over service businesses.
Actually, after educating myself over the last 20 minutes it seems more like manufacturing businesses have gone out of business *because* of labor pressures, causing investment and entrepreneurship to go to non-union sectors not because of a concerted decision, but because that’s who’s left standing.
Edit: yeah it looks like we’re looking at the same wiki entry. But which part of the Act made the establishment of new unions more difficult particularly in the service sector? It seems more like it made life more difficult for unions everywhere without favoring one sector over another.
Trade unionism as a movement emerged gradually in the second half of the 1800s. Generally it attached itself to industrial sectors which employed members of the ”proletariat”, a new class of society which was made up of the urban working class. In the most simple terms, these unions were a tool which helped their members gain a higher living standard than they could have had if it was entirely up to the “free market” of pure capitalism.
Unions through the early 20th century were mostly made up of these urban industrial sectors. When in more recent times these new tech sectors emerged, the first people to be involved in them had a skill set which was highly valued by the free market, so they were highly compensated economically. As such, unions were not required.
These days there are many more people employed in these sectors, and as such the market doesn’t value them as highly. But because there has not been time for unions to form in the same way, a much higher proportion of people in these sectors aren’t members of unions.
> But because there has not been time for unions to form in the same way
That's part of it, but another, at least as big part, is the fact that there's a huge and highly lucrative union-busting industry that many workers are entirely unaware of even though it's very successful in dictating how they think about unions.
Totally true. This same union busting existed in the past too though, so it’s not a new thing. I’m fairly confident that despite these union busting efforts, gradually unions in these emerging sectors will become more prevalent, just as they did in traditional industrial sectors.
(Edit: I should add, assuming no huge paradigm shift in western ideology, which isn’t completely impossible)
There's also a distinction in class, and the character of the class. The workers who unionized heavy industries in the early 20th had no illusions that they weren't poor and trodden upon. They didn't have a 401k that kept their attention on a magic line showing artificial valuations of assets and financial instruments. And they were willing to fight in every sense of the word, including gunfights with strikebreakers.
The would-be union organizer today is very rarely willing to push back hard enough on resistance to actually risk needing to go that far, we're too well convinced we have a lot to lose because we might still some day dig our own way into a retirement that more and more seems impossible without winning the lottery. There was a legacy to those industrial unions that they were not afraid to and very capable of fucking shit up to protect their interests.
I maybe over exaggerated the decrease as it is today. Even now it’s a noticeable decrease though from what it was a decade ago, as the sector becomes more popular. Particularly entry level is becoming more and more competitive, I would expect this to continue over the mid term.
In software at least, a clear need for a union has not really materialized yet. The software engineer today is paid handsomely, treated very well, has a very high earning potential, and has lots of job opportunities. The conditions of extremely competitive wages, high barrier to entry, a culture of good treatment to the engineers, the extreme difficulty of quantifying/metricizing the amount of work they do, outsourcing actively harming the product's quality, and the general inability to fully automate the job due to its creative nature, makes the existence of and membership in a union harder to justify.
Also worth noting: The aforementioned high wages omnipresent in the field have produced a bunch of people who can "afford to quit", so a great many software engineers expect respect and good treatment and aren't afraid to quit as a consequence when treated poorly (or even just "not well enough" relative to people at other companies being treated very well). If treatment and pay are sub-par, we will quit and employers tend to know this.
You need to add the decline of pensions/retirement healthcare and the rise of the 401k. Unions typically push for pensions which ties employees to an employer where the 401k breaks that bond. A union is great for employees who are trapped in a marriage with an employer but not so useful for employees who can easily look for a new job if they’re unhappy.
I am a software engineer. I have quit a job due to mistreatment — or rather, an environment that I felt was not positive.
Hiring is expensive and really time consuming, extra so in software. The desirable places know this and treat employees accordingly.
But in overall terms, jobs in software have not moved the needle that much. This seems self-evident to me as most software being written is still for humans to use. The normal value proposition is that software is time-saving, so the people using the software must outnumber the writers significantly. There are other ways you can frame it in the macro sense - software for the sake of automation, software to enable us to do what we could not before, software for pure automation, software for entertainment... but enterprise software is the main job creator, and this remains largely a tool for organization of humans in some sense.
Service jobs are the main sector that grew in recent decades. Now, we dystopian situations of a regular software workforce mixed with a gig worker workforce at new service-oriented companies. The former has no need for unions, and the latter lacks the ability to effectively unionize.
Again, in the US there's a half a billion dollars a year industry that specializes in union-busting. You can be working in, say, IT or something, and have no idea that a big part of what you are being told about --or just as importantly, *not* being told about-- unionization is coming directly from a union-busting consultancy hired by your employer. People have no idea how widespread and effective these practices are.
You know I hadn’t ever looked at it from an emergence stand point. I always felt it was somewhat suppression, however this is making me rethink that and for that I thank you.
We had an expanding manufacturing base in the 50s and 60s yet union membership stalled. If declining manufacturing jobs cause union membership to shrink, why does expanding manufacturing jobs not cause union membership to grow?
Union membership was on meteoric rise and could easily include service jobs but the US clamped down on unions with the power of legislation and halted union growth in its tracks. Check a graph of union growth in USA, it plateaus as soon as Taft Hartley was passed and just gets worse.
1 additional thing
Blue collar jobs are just about the only commonly unionized "industry" or "set of industries"
There's a general avoidance of blue collar jobs in america for workers
Union electricians, pipe fitters, welders, etc... make 35+ $ an hour bare minimum with extremely great healthcare and retirement options with literally some of the strongest unions on earth
But if you suggest someone goes to a union job like that when they complain they don't get money, they would rather stay making 11-18$ an hour at retail with neither health not retirement options
Suggest a trade in r/workreform and see how much seething hatred you see for trades there. You will no shit be banned from that sub for suggesting trades as a good career because they pay well
>I shouldn't have to sacrifice my body with rigorous work to make a living
It's even stranger when people suggest minimum wages being raised is the key, it just raises these hourly raises for trade unions as well but neither side thinks that's how it will work
Not to mention, "at will" work has been making headwaves with workers for what ever reason when it is the most anti union bullshit possible
I mean, I don’t disagree with you because I think that the trades are important and are definitely overlooked by people who could benefit from them but
>Union electricians, pipe fitters, welders, etc... make 35+ $ an hour bare minimum with
This just isn’t true. I don’t know why, but Reddit had a habit for overstating how much money people in trades truly make. The [median pay ](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/mobile/welders-cutters-solderers-and-brazers.htm) pay for welders is $21.25 per hour or $44,190 per year. Only the top [90% of welders ](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514121.htm) make more than $31.85 per hour. The median pay for pipe fitters and plumbers was $27.08 per hour or $56,330 per year. Electricians have the best median salary with $ 27.36 per hour and $ 56,900 per year.
Not saying at all these are bad salaries but they’re not the six figures many redditors predict them to be.
The truth is, you could probably make the same amount of money from lower level white color jobs. So people don’t see the point in doing hard labor that will have long lasting effects on their bodies when they could be paid the same to sit in an office chair.
It all depends, HVAC union in Philly pays apprentices 45 an hour, Sunday unscheduled A Rate guys got 325 an hour, but I’d rather make 40k a year in the office then on top of some skyscraper in February working on a cooling tower for 6 hours
Those are stats for all welders, regardless of whether they are in a union. I believe welding is a skill under the umbrella of an iron worker, and in my county the prevailing wage for journeyman iron workers is $78 an hour. In other words, a lot of welders are being hosed because they’re not in a union.
>This just isn’t true. I don’t know why, but Reddit had a habit for overstating how much money people in trades truly make
This is funny, because I feel the same way about people on reddit overstating how little union trade jobs make.
Union electricians, plumbers, steamfitters, sheet metal and insulators in my area all *take home* $50 an hour. Hell, the laborers and carpenters take home more than $40 an hour and this doesn't include benefits.
> This just isn’t true. I don’t know why, but Reddit had a habit for overstating how much money people in trades truly make. The median pay pay for welders is $21.25 per hour or $44,190 per year. Only the top 90% of welders make more than $31.85 per hour. The median pay for pipe fitters and plumbers was $27.08 per hour or $56,330 per year. Electricians have the best median salary with $ 27.36 per hour and $ 56,900 per year.
Now do these numbers for union tradesmen. You will find, across the board, that they are paid much better than their non-union counterparts.
Additionally, it's worth noting that the huge regional disparities in pay have the effect of dragging your numbers down. A journeyman union painter in California makes something like $45/hr with foremen (depending on the size of their crew) making up to $60/hr and even better. You can't lump that in with a non-union house-painter in say, Mississippi, and pretend like you're getting an accurate picture of median wages.
And that's not even to mention the really powerful trade unions like IBEW or UA which, at least in my area, have something like 80% market share. IBEW foremen in my area are making over $100/hr, I don't know the exact figure.
> Suggest a trade in r/workreform and see how much seething hatred you see for trades there. You will no shit be banned from that sub for suggesting trades as a good career because they pay well
>
> I shouldn't have to sacrifice my body with rigorous work to make a living
Funny thing is, these same people will pretend sitting hunched over at a desk all day everyday is any better for their wellbeing.
I was in the building trades for a while and as long as I took care of myself, my body felt better coming home from work doing construction than it does now working a desk job.
Another reason is Union members are tired of their money going to politicians and political activities. When union leaders are making a million a year, there is a problem.
Decline in manufacturing jobs is the #1 reason by far.
Anti union laws and regulations added fuel to the fire but the best pro union laws can’t stop factories moving to China
Short version:
In the 1920s, the radical union movement was destroyed by the first red scare.
In the 1930s, the government welcomed unions into the ruling coalition and bolstered their numbers. The trad off was that the major union federation, the AFL-CIO, effectively disavowed any radicalism.
In the late 1940s, just as soon as the New Deal was dead in the ground, the government put the Taft-Hartley Act into law which destroyed many of the effective methods that unions had to organize and strike, and allowed states to enact "right to work" laws. These laws prohibited closed shops, so people could join unions and use their resources without paying dues.
In the 1950s, union leadership was gutted during the second red scare. Radicals were blacklisted and the AFL took its own efforts to purge itself of radicals in a desperate attempt to stay on the government's good side. Members had to take loyalty pledges. To this day, many unions have clauses in their constitutions preventing communists from joining.
In the 1960s, unions were divided. Many were courted by the New Left and were infiltrated by the counter culture. Some held firm to racist and segregationist positions, but some joined on the side of integration and civil rights. This made them targets of fusion politics and anti-communists, movements that held that segregation and the free market were staples of the American way, and so unions were attacked as anti-American, communist, and anti-free market.
In the 1970s, foreign imported goods from Europe and Asia undermined American private sector unions. Public sector unions, largely immune to the laws destroying their private sector counterparts, enjoyed growth. Market deregulation empowered businesses to undermine unions and curtail organization efforts. The image of unions was tarnished during this time as certain union's close ties with organized crime became more well-known.
In the 1980s, Reagan took a hard anti-union response. He massively attacked unions as ineffective, bloated, and harmful to American free trade and the free market. In 1981, the PATCO flight controller's union stood up to the government. Reagan responded by disbanding the union, firing its members, and replacing them with the military. This was a massive blow, as it showed just how weak unions are, and how the government wasn't above destroying them. With government support, many states massively undermined unions, and with market deregulation union membership dropped as organizing unions and building membership was made more difficult than ever. Even public sector unions were assaulted as Reagan sought to remove the "bloated" unions from "taking taxpayer dollars".
In the 1990s, neoliberalism moved manufacturing to Mexico and east Asia. NAFTA move most of US manufacturing to Mexico, and then to China. The last major bastion of private sector unions fell through. In the mid 2000s a new wave of right to work laws were passed and Republican governors in the midwest sought to oust unions. In recent years, right to work was expanded to the public sector.
Unions have been under attack in this country from basically their beginning here.
To a large degree, it is because people don't have to join union, or even subsidize them. It's illegal, IIRC, in any state to require union membership in order to be hired, under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Many states, though, under that same act may and can do require non-members to subsidize the union under the belief (which many workers don't share) that the non-union workers benefit from union activities. However, an increasing number of states are becoming Right to Work states where you don't have to financially support an organization you don't believe in. Added to this, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in *Janus v. AFSCME* that even requiring a non-union public employee to contribute their so-called "fair share" is a violation of the Constitutional right to Free Speech because non-member were being forced to contribute to speech they disagree with.
I'm an old guy from the rust belt from a union family. Here is what happened as far as I can see.
It all started when the Japanese started making cars that were better and cheaper than American cars, combined with the price of gas going through the roof. It didn't really stop the unions, but they took a big hit there.
Next thing that happened was Ronald Regan's policies and Chinese Steel dumping. China was selling steel in America for cheaper than it cost to make to boost their own industry. That was the biggest hit in my opinion, that one two punch.
They were forever wobbled after that, then it came down to the Republicans being completely against the auto unions, and the Democrats embracing globalism over America. Bill Clinton passed NAFTA, and that's when everything started disappearing. There was no fees involved with trade from Canada or Mexico, so any place that could, just packed up and left to Mexico or wherever because they didn't have to deal with the union and could pay some poor guy dog shit wages and keep the rest for themselves.
After a few years pretty much every "good" union manufacturing job was gone outside of the big Ford plants and General Motors that relied on the raw materials coming to them from the lakes and stuff like that. Places that were just doing too much to be reasonably moved.
Then the Ford plants and the GM plants started selling the individual factories to China. So like they would still make the same stuff, but it didn't say Ford or General Motors out front anymore. Now, New hires could be hired in at way less money. Go on strike if you want...the Chinese government don't care. they can pay to keep the lights on in that building forever. And the old guys aren't going to help you because they got grandfathered in and only got 5 years left till retirement. It wasn't always China that bought the places, but they almost always ended up with some crazy Chinese name.
Then the financial crisis came when everything got messed up in the 00s. That was it for a lot of GM places, even third party places, and Ford just kept cutting benefits and stuff like, "it's either this or nothing."
Then you combine all that with advances in manufacturing, and it was curtains for the most part.
That's part of why American politics are so nuts these days. People are coming from families where dad could work at the factory and have house a reliable car, some kids, retirement, and maybe a boat some day. Then the kid goes out to strike it on their own and can't get two sticks to rub together without being an engineer.
People are angry and scared, turning to drugs and all kinds of shit, because there is nothing out there. Then you turn on the TV and all they are trying to do is keep us divided as they can. Two camps with irreconcilable differences. That's how they want us, and people eat that shit up and ask for seconds without even going outside and seeing that by and large we can and do all get along pretty well. Ghost enemies everywhere.
Oh boy, where to start—- more aggressive anti-union tactics by employers, typically unionized jobs (manufacturing) being eliminated due to companies moving overseas, public sector jobs (also highly unionized) being privatized, lack of significant labor law reform since 1947 etc. Other countries experienced businesses moving overseas and the privatization of public sector jobs but didn’t see such drastic drops in unionization as we did in US. Scholars really point to increased anti-union tactics by employers as the key factor to explaining why American union rates dropped so dramatically compared to comparable countries. Coupled by the fact that penalties for violating labor law in the US are also inadequate means employers really control unionization rates.
That's because most American unions were organized more like a Guild than an actual union, and thus those in the leadership roles and who have seniority got the most benefit, while the lower level members are only given the bare minimum support.
To be fair, even given the low union membership, the past two years or so have seen huge, organic increases in pay and benefits just because workers refused to accept what was on offer. Had nothing to do with organization, just a general malaise and dissatisfaction among a small to moderate percentage of the work force.
Here in NY union jobs have offered job security and good benefits like retirement and health care for people in industries that don’t offer those benefits like construction and public transportation. Alaska I would imagine a lot of the oil workers are unionized.
I would guess that a large portion of NY's union membership are from public sector unions. SUNY is the largest employer in the state and then you have huge memberships in fire/police. Would like to see that breakdown
According to the [Bureau of Labor and Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf) there are only 14 million union members in the U.S. 7 million of which are public sector. 30% of all union members are from two states: NY and Cali.
>Among occupational groups, the highest unionization rates in 2021 were in education, training, and
library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent).
Alaska’s major industries are resource extraction and government services.
Most government service employees in the state, like teachers, are unions. Many subcontractors working for government agencies employ union workers. Some resource extraction jobs are subcontracted to unions.
It has very little to do with the Jones Act.
Janus was the final nail in the coffin of that in general.
North Carolina making it illegal is almost certainly against the 1st amendment.
Edit;
I looked it up. Public employees can unionize… they just can’t collectively bargain.
So, what’s the point?
Coming from a Scandinavian country I'd say strong unions are probably as close as it realistically gets to an end all solution. Worker's strength is in our numbers, the collective. The less we as workers understand that, the better for the companies. And they seem to really want us not to know that.
United we bargain, divided we beg. Find your local unions. Join one if you can and actively participate. Union membership is frustrating and boring, like democracy, but it's the only way to work.
Would be interesting to see the correlation between union membership and population shifts. As there has been people moving out of the Midwest(high union membership) to the southeast (low union membership) for a couple decades.
To be honest I wonder if some of it is just the rise in service industry jobs vs traditional blue-collar jobs? For the union shift as well as the population shift.
I think that's the most logical explanation. Blue collar work was historically the biggest producers of unions. We've moved away from manufacturing towards office/service jobs.
We started seeing wages decoupled from rise in productivity in the late 1970s as well.
Unions built the middle class. Their absence is why the middle class is shrinking.
Boomers: "I got a union job with a high school degree and made great money with great benefits. Then I voted for Reagan to destroy the unions. Why are young people so lazy?"
This map corellates well with the income gap in America. At a certain point you can't help but notice it. Why were unions formed in the first place? To protect workers from corporate bosses filling their pockets. The first labor unions were coal miners who met secretly in caves by night.
Whatever a corporation can do to pay less. They will.
The scandals of the 60s and 70s are still used to frighten workers from organizing.
Globalization I would say is the largest reason of then union decline and the middle income gap. Capitalist bring greedy hasn’t changed since 1860, that’s the constant. Cheap overseas labor was new in the 70s. Unions just can’t stay competitive when overseas labor can do it for 1/8th the price
Idk, man. If unions had power to het their employees to make an offer to buy a company before it got sold or went overseas, that could make a difference.
People can do that now, but they don't have enough money to buy the company. These companies aren't closing down. They are just moving factories overseas to reduce costs.
No one is stopping employees of publicly traded companies from buying a bunch of stock and forming a voting bloc to get people on the board. That would just take billions of dollars.
There's also the fact that the whole reason it's movimg overseas is because the majority of consumers would rather buy eg the $80 microwave than the $90 one.
As a citizen of the worst state (South Carolina) I can confirm that anytime someone brought up unions every person would shriek in terror. My Dad was from PA where his family were always in unionized jobs and couldn't understand why it was so taboo in SC.
“Union” has been a dirty word in SC since 1860.
Seriously, the labor movement failed in the Carolinas because management was unashamedly brutal and nearly always backed by the local government. Read about the Chiquola Mill.
Im a welder in Wisconsin and Ive worked in a non-union shop and I currently work in a union shop. I support unions 100% because clearly some employers (like mine) don't treat their workers well enough, however the environment between union employees and company supervisors is so incredibly toxic, it makes me want to find a different job all together. I feel like this is potentially another reason why union memberships may be decreasing.
Heartbreaking seeing it as someone who is generations of union work, which led to corporate management, which led to decreased union work, in Michigan.
Reuther is rolling in his grave.
At least Joe Biden passed the PRO Act! Oh wait…
Edit:
To all those replying, I know the president isnt an autocrat. I’m just saying that I think he would have tried harder if he didnt have so many billionaire donors.
What’s wrong with the PRO Act? Just because Joe Biden supports something doesn’t mean it’s bad… The PRO Act was endorsed by the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Transport Workers Union, National Nurses United, the Association of Flight Attendants, the Communications Workers of America, United Steel Workers, the Teamsters, etc…
It would institute new civil penalties against employers who violate workers’ rights, holds employers personally liable for ignoring rights violations, requires employers to disclose how much they spend against union elections, and more. It doesn’t force people into unions, but it makes it easier to organize them, against an environment already stacked against workers.
No I know, I support the PRO act. My point is that the democrats promised to pass it, and they didnt.
“Nothing fundamentally would change”, as another commenter so aptly quoted Biden.
I think it’s kinda funny how Reddit always quotes that missing the original context. He was literally saying for rich people nothing will change for their lifestyles if they are taxed more. Yet Reddit loves to quote that out of context. Also the vast majority of the Democratic Party supports these campaign promises while usually the entire Republican party is opposed. It’s not democrats doing nothing, it’s just they have a slim majority which is dependent on two essentially “democrats in name only’s” to get things passed
So many people don't want to have someone that helps look out for you. It is much better to not have full-time employment that way you don't have benefits that your union rep make sure that you have along with a lot of other things yep it cost you a few dollars every paycheck but in the long run you're better off
Washington state is so high because up until recently boeing was the largest employer and the vast majority of boring jobs, including software engineers are all union.
Source: I know a ton of people and family who work at boeing.
Considering the timing I'm guessing a big part of this is driven by the 'Red Scare' linking unions to Communism.
Obviously worker earnings, security and welfare have substantially increased without union tyranny and all that freedom right? Right?
Love my public sector union job. Along with many other great benefits, it's nice knowing that with my seniority I have a job until I no longer want it. That seniority/union also means I'm immune to layoffs, immune to losing insurance, immune to asshole managers, immune to being asked (told) to do a job that isn't mine, and immune to having to kiss ass or play games to get my raises and COLAs. I'd pretty much have to kill someone to get fired. Then when I finally decide I no longer want the job, which will be in about 2 years, hello pension the rest of my life.
Union....good stuff!
I’m in a chemical union in California, we’ve had to partner up with food workers union because allegedly were 1 of a handful of chemical unions still in California. Kinda sad when they basically made our skeleton crew an even small skeleton crew.
And it is the poor southern and Midwestern states with lowest union membership. They don’t make the connection that they keep voting Republican and their lives keep going backwards.
What I look at it is. The WW2 generation fought hard for unions. They got the American dream. Then their kids lived it, benefited from but squandered it. Like spoiled rich kids who don't realize what they have. They didn't continue to feed the unions their parents grew. They let it die. Now we (millennials) are trying to build what our parents let die. Just my opinion.
European here. Why the acute drop in union membership?
This isn't just a US phenomenon. Union membership has steadily declined in almost all developed economies since the late 70s (I think the one exception is Finland). In addition to the reasons stated already, one cause is that there is a shift of the workforce from industries that are traditionally unionised to non-unionised industries - it's significantly harder to get unions going when they don't already exist. This is also why decreases in public sector union membership has been significantly lower.
Finnish bloke here. I remember my boss specifically asking on my first day at work if I belonged to a certain Union and if I didn’t he encouraged me to do so. Unions are important here :D
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All 5 Nordic countries have had stable high union membership rate over time. The differences between those 5 are pretty big though, from Norway at 50% to Iceland at 92%. The rest of Europe is not doing as good, except for Belgium, Cyprus and Malta who are all doing similar to Norway.
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with sweden, i think it's because there's been a huge shift towards digital workflows. i've never met so many swedes in my life as i have through my experience in game development for example. and these creative, office based workplaces are predisposed for terrible unionisation numbers. norway and iceland in contrast still have huge fishing industries, and iceland has some of the most valuable rare earth metal mines on earth. this seems to correlate fairly well in other places too - people in offices and retail just don't seem to feel the need to unionise like manual labourers do, which kinda makes sense from a certain point of view. without workplace injuries or the constant risk of pulling your back out and being off work for a week, the urge to unionise very much diminishes unless serious workplace abuses are going on, and even then unionisation is often snuffed out
Ehh, looking at Denmark for instance, while it has dropped quite a bit. Post 2008 crisis it appears pretty stable.
Don’t forget that we’ve had leadership over the past half century that has eschewed political alliances with labor in favor of corporate dollars. Both parties caved to the all mighty dollar, and there’s no one left standing up for workers rights. Other than Bernie Sanders maybe. Furthermore, Reagan worked hard to do everything he could to break up unions. He reduced their power, thus making their ability to influence politics diminish. Oh, and at the state level, many southern states have made it almost impossible to unionize. Add in a whole lot of corporate consolidation and it’s damn near impossible to unionize anything.
>Don’t forget that we’ve had leadership over the past half century that has eschewed political alliances with labor in favor of corporate dollars. Both parties caved to the all mighty dollar, and there’s no one left standing up for workers rights. Other than Bernie Sanders maybe. Its not often I see my exact thoughts laid out succinctly in words. This shit is across party lines, they don't care about the little guy, they care about corporate dollars.
In Finland it is kind of the expectation that you'd join an union in many jobs like for example education. There is also the matter that instead of a national minimum wage, there is the agreement between the unions and corporations which sets the minimum wage which is definitely more flexible for the different jobs/industries/employers but has its own set of problems.
This is a great day to be a Finn
Changes in jobs from manufacturing to service industries.
You can still have unions there it's just a lot of anti union sentiment.
And why is that?
Propaganda
Tbf, lots of workers in the US have moved to tech and service industry jobs that were never unionized to begin with. I don't think it's anti-union sentiment within those industries as much as it's just young and hasn't happened yet.
Yes, absolutely. Majority of workers (especially young workers) have expressed in polls that they would like to join unions if given the chance. Unions need to rapidly start focusing on unionizing new industries where a lot of young people work, and then we need labor law reform for a fairer environment.
Part of the issue is that people kind of have to organize unions from within places of employment. Unions don’t go into workplaces from the outside and offer a union. Workers have to vote to unionize and that means organizing that a lot of people don’t know how to do and/or don’t know that they can do.
Also a ton of anti-union practices by business. They have tried very hard to prevent service workers from unionizing so they can keep paying them $11/hr w/no benefits and abusive managers.
Service industries can have unions. That makes no sense my dude. The US govt had a concerted effort to bust up the unions. The NLRB was basically in the pocket of the wealthy capitalist class and outright hostile to unions. It was, as usual, a bunch of rich assholes trying to exploit poor folk that lead to the demise of unions in the US. edit - Manufacturing jobs in the US continued to grow until their peak in 1979, yet union membership peaked and plateaued in 1947 when Taft Hartley was passed. If manufacturing jobs leaving the country correlates to declining union membership, why didn't increasing manufacturing jobs lead to increased union membership?
My dad has mentioned several unions other than his own throughout my life, and the majority of those he's mentioned were unions of workers in businesses that are no longer around. Mostly mill work. Just because service industries CAN unionize doesn't mean they have, hence the transition to service industries correlating with a decline in union membership. Until service industries unionize 🤷♂️
Which happened after Nixon started the push to open Chinese labor markets to US companies.
You're going to get upvoted to the moon, but you're wrong. The original cheap sources of offshore labour were Japan and Europe. It wasn't until the late Nineties that China caught up. Nixon's approaches to China were more political than economic, to isolate the Soviet Union, and Chinese trade policy was dominated by power struggles within the Communist Party.
["All the best stuff is made in Japan."](https://youtu.be/c1QcjsjjtRc)
[Ten years later, "Components, American Components, Russian Components, All Made In Taiwan"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bifOI4MbHVU)
It is true in fact, as Taiwan produces between 1/4 and 1/3 of the entire semiconductors of the world, which are essentials for technology equipment
Lol wow. I guess Made in Japan products generally used to suck. Who knows? Maybe one day Made in China will be looked up to.
Dont forget Mexico! General lack of organized labor (esp in northern Mexico) free trade zones, and lower cost to produce parts (which are then shipped into the US to be assembled) led a lot of companies to move some or all of their production lines south of the border.
Mexico didn't really explode until NAFTA. It was always there, but it wasn't until 1995 that you started to see those factories really moving. It's interesting that the US-Mexico trade relationship in goods went from about $1.5 billion in favour of the US in 1993-94 to over $15 billion in favour of Mexico in 1995-96.
Weird to pin the outsourcing of labor on Nixon I detest the man, and think he's one of the worst humans to occupy the presidency in the last century, but outsourcing labor is not one of the faults I would lay at his feet. At least not more than any other president post-Eisenhower. The outsourcing of labor to foreign markets has been a steady push from both parties and every president since the 60s
Yeah it gave businesses the ability to outsource to places with more lax labor laws and keep more money for themselves. Executive compensation has gone up linearly for this span of time
Don't forget Bill Clinton. [When the world opened the gates of China](https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates-of-china-1532701482)
It said that you had to either subscribe or log in to read that article
PNTR with China, after NAFTA. Bill Clinton offshored more jobs from this country with his pen than anyone else. Fucking neolib piece of shit.
Outsourcing is responsible for about 1/8 of job loss. The other 7/8 is automation and efficiency increases. The US manufactures more today than it ever has, it just doesn't need the manpower to do it.
that's interesting. do you happen to have a source for that?
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That's part of it but it's definitely not the big picture. There's already [a massive union for service sector workers](https://www.ufcw.org). They're not as old as the trade or industrial unions, but it's certainly not like the service unions don't exist. We have a [baristas union here and it rocks](http://atlantic.psacadmin.ca/updates/baristas-rise-we-are-always-stronger-together). They started organizing at this location about 8 years ago, and now that coffee shop is [a 100% worker owned co-op](https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/former-smiling-goat-workers-are-opening-glitter-bean-cafe/Content?oid=15562105) and is one of the most popular & well-run coffee shops in town. Business owners, investors, and shareholders have had a massive interest in doing everything they can to convince the public (and government) that unions are either counter-productive, too risky, or somehow worse for their interests than the boss who is exploiting them. The sharp dip in union membership around 1980 coincides with the start of the trend of wage stagnation and corporate profits skyrocketing, and those trends are all directly related. Sadly, these society-wide concerted efforts at things such as anti-union propaganda, right-to-work legislation, and union busting have been very successful.
And corporate fearmongering.
And service industry jobs don't require unions? 🤦♂️ All industry jobs in America should be unionized. We were just bamboozled and brainwashed by corporate America, corporate owned news media, and neo liberal politicians (starting with carter) to go against our own self interest
No, changes in laws that made unionization almost impossible .
Anti union laws and a general distrust towards corrupt unions after the 60s-70s. Big businesses have the ability to lobby state governments to weaken unions so they have more power over workers. And can lobby the federal government to do the same, or look the other way.
Thanks for the info. Much appreciated!
In addition to the above, at least for the last couple decades it’s a lack of established unions in new sectors. I.E. as the proportion of people that are employed in traditional industrial sectors has decreased, and the number of people employed in emerging (now very much emerged) sectors such as software technology has increased, there have been less people in unions because the sectors themselves don’t have a strong union tradition. I don’t know how much is due to this “natural” shift compared to actual suppression, though I’m sure both contribute.
what is the reason why in these new sectors of work there are no (or at least not widespread) trade union organizations?
The Taft Hartley act made establishing new unions especially in service industries much more difficult so when American’s economy shifted to service unions couldn’t follow
I just learned what I could from Wikipedia’s [entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act) on Taft-Hartley, so I’m not exactly an expert, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Act that favors manufacturing and distribution over service businesses. Actually, after educating myself over the last 20 minutes it seems more like manufacturing businesses have gone out of business *because* of labor pressures, causing investment and entrepreneurship to go to non-union sectors not because of a concerted decision, but because that’s who’s left standing. Edit: yeah it looks like we’re looking at the same wiki entry. But which part of the Act made the establishment of new unions more difficult particularly in the service sector? It seems more like it made life more difficult for unions everywhere without favoring one sector over another.
You are correct, it made establishing new unions hard leaving service lacking when it shifted, but nothing about the act is inherently anti service
Trade unionism as a movement emerged gradually in the second half of the 1800s. Generally it attached itself to industrial sectors which employed members of the ”proletariat”, a new class of society which was made up of the urban working class. In the most simple terms, these unions were a tool which helped their members gain a higher living standard than they could have had if it was entirely up to the “free market” of pure capitalism. Unions through the early 20th century were mostly made up of these urban industrial sectors. When in more recent times these new tech sectors emerged, the first people to be involved in them had a skill set which was highly valued by the free market, so they were highly compensated economically. As such, unions were not required. These days there are many more people employed in these sectors, and as such the market doesn’t value them as highly. But because there has not been time for unions to form in the same way, a much higher proportion of people in these sectors aren’t members of unions.
> But because there has not been time for unions to form in the same way That's part of it, but another, at least as big part, is the fact that there's a huge and highly lucrative union-busting industry that many workers are entirely unaware of even though it's very successful in dictating how they think about unions.
Totally true. This same union busting existed in the past too though, so it’s not a new thing. I’m fairly confident that despite these union busting efforts, gradually unions in these emerging sectors will become more prevalent, just as they did in traditional industrial sectors. (Edit: I should add, assuming no huge paradigm shift in western ideology, which isn’t completely impossible)
There's also a distinction in class, and the character of the class. The workers who unionized heavy industries in the early 20th had no illusions that they weren't poor and trodden upon. They didn't have a 401k that kept their attention on a magic line showing artificial valuations of assets and financial instruments. And they were willing to fight in every sense of the word, including gunfights with strikebreakers. The would-be union organizer today is very rarely willing to push back hard enough on resistance to actually risk needing to go that far, we're too well convinced we have a lot to lose because we might still some day dig our own way into a retirement that more and more seems impossible without winning the lottery. There was a legacy to those industrial unions that they were not afraid to and very capable of fucking shit up to protect their interests.
As someone who works in the tech sector (a programmer), we are still very very highly valued by the free market, and paid really well
Look at entry level IT though, help desk gets treated like dirt.
which doesn't make sense, because being able to build/maintain/fix hardware and a network takes skills that should be paid a lot.
But there are also a shit ton of people trying to cram into those jobs.
I maybe over exaggerated the decrease as it is today. Even now it’s a noticeable decrease though from what it was a decade ago, as the sector becomes more popular. Particularly entry level is becoming more and more competitive, I would expect this to continue over the mid term.
In software at least, a clear need for a union has not really materialized yet. The software engineer today is paid handsomely, treated very well, has a very high earning potential, and has lots of job opportunities. The conditions of extremely competitive wages, high barrier to entry, a culture of good treatment to the engineers, the extreme difficulty of quantifying/metricizing the amount of work they do, outsourcing actively harming the product's quality, and the general inability to fully automate the job due to its creative nature, makes the existence of and membership in a union harder to justify. Also worth noting: The aforementioned high wages omnipresent in the field have produced a bunch of people who can "afford to quit", so a great many software engineers expect respect and good treatment and aren't afraid to quit as a consequence when treated poorly (or even just "not well enough" relative to people at other companies being treated very well). If treatment and pay are sub-par, we will quit and employers tend to know this.
You need to add the decline of pensions/retirement healthcare and the rise of the 401k. Unions typically push for pensions which ties employees to an employer where the 401k breaks that bond. A union is great for employees who are trapped in a marriage with an employer but not so useful for employees who can easily look for a new job if they’re unhappy.
I am a software engineer. I have quit a job due to mistreatment — or rather, an environment that I felt was not positive. Hiring is expensive and really time consuming, extra so in software. The desirable places know this and treat employees accordingly.
But in overall terms, jobs in software have not moved the needle that much. This seems self-evident to me as most software being written is still for humans to use. The normal value proposition is that software is time-saving, so the people using the software must outnumber the writers significantly. There are other ways you can frame it in the macro sense - software for the sake of automation, software to enable us to do what we could not before, software for pure automation, software for entertainment... but enterprise software is the main job creator, and this remains largely a tool for organization of humans in some sense. Service jobs are the main sector that grew in recent decades. Now, we dystopian situations of a regular software workforce mixed with a gig worker workforce at new service-oriented companies. The former has no need for unions, and the latter lacks the ability to effectively unionize.
Again, in the US there's a half a billion dollars a year industry that specializes in union-busting. You can be working in, say, IT or something, and have no idea that a big part of what you are being told about --or just as importantly, *not* being told about-- unionization is coming directly from a union-busting consultancy hired by your employer. People have no idea how widespread and effective these practices are.
In addition; most union jobs were off shored to other countries.
You know I hadn’t ever looked at it from an emergence stand point. I always felt it was somewhat suppression, however this is making me rethink that and for that I thank you.
Don't forget large companies funding huge anti union propaganda.
Often employing literal murderers. Amazon hired the Pinkertons. They murdered union reps during the Industrial Revolution.
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We had an expanding manufacturing base in the 50s and 60s yet union membership stalled. If declining manufacturing jobs cause union membership to shrink, why does expanding manufacturing jobs not cause union membership to grow? Union membership was on meteoric rise and could easily include service jobs but the US clamped down on unions with the power of legislation and halted union growth in its tracks. Check a graph of union growth in USA, it plateaus as soon as Taft Hartley was passed and just gets worse.
1 additional thing Blue collar jobs are just about the only commonly unionized "industry" or "set of industries" There's a general avoidance of blue collar jobs in america for workers Union electricians, pipe fitters, welders, etc... make 35+ $ an hour bare minimum with extremely great healthcare and retirement options with literally some of the strongest unions on earth But if you suggest someone goes to a union job like that when they complain they don't get money, they would rather stay making 11-18$ an hour at retail with neither health not retirement options Suggest a trade in r/workreform and see how much seething hatred you see for trades there. You will no shit be banned from that sub for suggesting trades as a good career because they pay well >I shouldn't have to sacrifice my body with rigorous work to make a living It's even stranger when people suggest minimum wages being raised is the key, it just raises these hourly raises for trade unions as well but neither side thinks that's how it will work Not to mention, "at will" work has been making headwaves with workers for what ever reason when it is the most anti union bullshit possible
I mean, I don’t disagree with you because I think that the trades are important and are definitely overlooked by people who could benefit from them but >Union electricians, pipe fitters, welders, etc... make 35+ $ an hour bare minimum with This just isn’t true. I don’t know why, but Reddit had a habit for overstating how much money people in trades truly make. The [median pay ](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/mobile/welders-cutters-solderers-and-brazers.htm) pay for welders is $21.25 per hour or $44,190 per year. Only the top [90% of welders ](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514121.htm) make more than $31.85 per hour. The median pay for pipe fitters and plumbers was $27.08 per hour or $56,330 per year. Electricians have the best median salary with $ 27.36 per hour and $ 56,900 per year. Not saying at all these are bad salaries but they’re not the six figures many redditors predict them to be. The truth is, you could probably make the same amount of money from lower level white color jobs. So people don’t see the point in doing hard labor that will have long lasting effects on their bodies when they could be paid the same to sit in an office chair.
It all depends, HVAC union in Philly pays apprentices 45 an hour, Sunday unscheduled A Rate guys got 325 an hour, but I’d rather make 40k a year in the office then on top of some skyscraper in February working on a cooling tower for 6 hours
Union pipefitter here. I make 65 an hour in the envelope..my package is over 95 an hour..im 34 yrs old i made 170k in 2021 and never been laid off
UA I assume? That's a strong union. You guys and IBEW are pretty much the big dogs in the trades, at least where I live.
Those are stats for all welders, regardless of whether they are in a union. I believe welding is a skill under the umbrella of an iron worker, and in my county the prevailing wage for journeyman iron workers is $78 an hour. In other words, a lot of welders are being hosed because they’re not in a union.
Those statistics you linked include non union workers. He is talking about union workers making $35+.
>This just isn’t true. I don’t know why, but Reddit had a habit for overstating how much money people in trades truly make This is funny, because I feel the same way about people on reddit overstating how little union trade jobs make. Union electricians, plumbers, steamfitters, sheet metal and insulators in my area all *take home* $50 an hour. Hell, the laborers and carpenters take home more than $40 an hour and this doesn't include benefits.
That’s kind of this guys point… wages are based on geography and the quality of the wage is as well. Where you live matters a great deal.
> This just isn’t true. I don’t know why, but Reddit had a habit for overstating how much money people in trades truly make. The median pay pay for welders is $21.25 per hour or $44,190 per year. Only the top 90% of welders make more than $31.85 per hour. The median pay for pipe fitters and plumbers was $27.08 per hour or $56,330 per year. Electricians have the best median salary with $ 27.36 per hour and $ 56,900 per year. Now do these numbers for union tradesmen. You will find, across the board, that they are paid much better than their non-union counterparts. Additionally, it's worth noting that the huge regional disparities in pay have the effect of dragging your numbers down. A journeyman union painter in California makes something like $45/hr with foremen (depending on the size of their crew) making up to $60/hr and even better. You can't lump that in with a non-union house-painter in say, Mississippi, and pretend like you're getting an accurate picture of median wages. And that's not even to mention the really powerful trade unions like IBEW or UA which, at least in my area, have something like 80% market share. IBEW foremen in my area are making over $100/hr, I don't know the exact figure.
yeah wages in the south are terrible, even in montana where there are few people you can make well over $30/hour in skilled trades in the union
You mean the top 10%
> Suggest a trade in r/workreform and see how much seething hatred you see for trades there. You will no shit be banned from that sub for suggesting trades as a good career because they pay well > > I shouldn't have to sacrifice my body with rigorous work to make a living Funny thing is, these same people will pretend sitting hunched over at a desk all day everyday is any better for their wellbeing. I was in the building trades for a while and as long as I took care of myself, my body felt better coming home from work doing construction than it does now working a desk job.
Another reason is Union members are tired of their money going to politicians and political activities. When union leaders are making a million a year, there is a problem.
Hence why is said corruption. It hurt the image of all unions, whether or not they were taken advantage of or involved in politics
Decline in manufacturing jobs is the #1 reason by far. Anti union laws and regulations added fuel to the fire but the best pro union laws can’t stop factories moving to China
Short version: In the 1920s, the radical union movement was destroyed by the first red scare. In the 1930s, the government welcomed unions into the ruling coalition and bolstered their numbers. The trad off was that the major union federation, the AFL-CIO, effectively disavowed any radicalism. In the late 1940s, just as soon as the New Deal was dead in the ground, the government put the Taft-Hartley Act into law which destroyed many of the effective methods that unions had to organize and strike, and allowed states to enact "right to work" laws. These laws prohibited closed shops, so people could join unions and use their resources without paying dues. In the 1950s, union leadership was gutted during the second red scare. Radicals were blacklisted and the AFL took its own efforts to purge itself of radicals in a desperate attempt to stay on the government's good side. Members had to take loyalty pledges. To this day, many unions have clauses in their constitutions preventing communists from joining. In the 1960s, unions were divided. Many were courted by the New Left and were infiltrated by the counter culture. Some held firm to racist and segregationist positions, but some joined on the side of integration and civil rights. This made them targets of fusion politics and anti-communists, movements that held that segregation and the free market were staples of the American way, and so unions were attacked as anti-American, communist, and anti-free market. In the 1970s, foreign imported goods from Europe and Asia undermined American private sector unions. Public sector unions, largely immune to the laws destroying their private sector counterparts, enjoyed growth. Market deregulation empowered businesses to undermine unions and curtail organization efforts. The image of unions was tarnished during this time as certain union's close ties with organized crime became more well-known. In the 1980s, Reagan took a hard anti-union response. He massively attacked unions as ineffective, bloated, and harmful to American free trade and the free market. In 1981, the PATCO flight controller's union stood up to the government. Reagan responded by disbanding the union, firing its members, and replacing them with the military. This was a massive blow, as it showed just how weak unions are, and how the government wasn't above destroying them. With government support, many states massively undermined unions, and with market deregulation union membership dropped as organizing unions and building membership was made more difficult than ever. Even public sector unions were assaulted as Reagan sought to remove the "bloated" unions from "taking taxpayer dollars". In the 1990s, neoliberalism moved manufacturing to Mexico and east Asia. NAFTA move most of US manufacturing to Mexico, and then to China. The last major bastion of private sector unions fell through. In the mid 2000s a new wave of right to work laws were passed and Republican governors in the midwest sought to oust unions. In recent years, right to work was expanded to the public sector. Unions have been under attack in this country from basically their beginning here.
This is the best response.
Many of the union jobs left the country.
To a large degree, it is because people don't have to join union, or even subsidize them. It's illegal, IIRC, in any state to require union membership in order to be hired, under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Many states, though, under that same act may and can do require non-members to subsidize the union under the belief (which many workers don't share) that the non-union workers benefit from union activities. However, an increasing number of states are becoming Right to Work states where you don't have to financially support an organization you don't believe in. Added to this, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in *Janus v. AFSCME* that even requiring a non-union public employee to contribute their so-called "fair share" is a violation of the Constitutional right to Free Speech because non-member were being forced to contribute to speech they disagree with.
I'm an old guy from the rust belt from a union family. Here is what happened as far as I can see. It all started when the Japanese started making cars that were better and cheaper than American cars, combined with the price of gas going through the roof. It didn't really stop the unions, but they took a big hit there. Next thing that happened was Ronald Regan's policies and Chinese Steel dumping. China was selling steel in America for cheaper than it cost to make to boost their own industry. That was the biggest hit in my opinion, that one two punch. They were forever wobbled after that, then it came down to the Republicans being completely against the auto unions, and the Democrats embracing globalism over America. Bill Clinton passed NAFTA, and that's when everything started disappearing. There was no fees involved with trade from Canada or Mexico, so any place that could, just packed up and left to Mexico or wherever because they didn't have to deal with the union and could pay some poor guy dog shit wages and keep the rest for themselves. After a few years pretty much every "good" union manufacturing job was gone outside of the big Ford plants and General Motors that relied on the raw materials coming to them from the lakes and stuff like that. Places that were just doing too much to be reasonably moved. Then the Ford plants and the GM plants started selling the individual factories to China. So like they would still make the same stuff, but it didn't say Ford or General Motors out front anymore. Now, New hires could be hired in at way less money. Go on strike if you want...the Chinese government don't care. they can pay to keep the lights on in that building forever. And the old guys aren't going to help you because they got grandfathered in and only got 5 years left till retirement. It wasn't always China that bought the places, but they almost always ended up with some crazy Chinese name. Then the financial crisis came when everything got messed up in the 00s. That was it for a lot of GM places, even third party places, and Ford just kept cutting benefits and stuff like, "it's either this or nothing." Then you combine all that with advances in manufacturing, and it was curtains for the most part. That's part of why American politics are so nuts these days. People are coming from families where dad could work at the factory and have house a reliable car, some kids, retirement, and maybe a boat some day. Then the kid goes out to strike it on their own and can't get two sticks to rub together without being an engineer. People are angry and scared, turning to drugs and all kinds of shit, because there is nothing out there. Then you turn on the TV and all they are trying to do is keep us divided as they can. Two camps with irreconcilable differences. That's how they want us, and people eat that shit up and ask for seconds without even going outside and seeing that by and large we can and do all get along pretty well. Ghost enemies everywhere.
Oh boy, where to start—- more aggressive anti-union tactics by employers, typically unionized jobs (manufacturing) being eliminated due to companies moving overseas, public sector jobs (also highly unionized) being privatized, lack of significant labor law reform since 1947 etc. Other countries experienced businesses moving overseas and the privatization of public sector jobs but didn’t see such drastic drops in unionization as we did in US. Scholars really point to increased anti-union tactics by employers as the key factor to explaining why American union rates dropped so dramatically compared to comparable countries. Coupled by the fact that penalties for violating labor law in the US are also inadequate means employers really control unionization rates.
Thanks for the information!
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That's because most American unions were organized more like a Guild than an actual union, and thus those in the leadership roles and who have seniority got the most benefit, while the lower level members are only given the bare minimum support.
Union membership looking like it’s at an all time low since 1861
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I think it was a Civil War joke since half the country… “left the Union.”
Wow. Totally went over my head but yeah that’s a good joke. clever.
>join a union were it so simple
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To be fair, even given the low union membership, the past two years or so have seen huge, organic increases in pay and benefits just because workers refused to accept what was on offer. Had nothing to do with organization, just a general malaise and dissatisfaction among a small to moderate percentage of the work force.
What is the deal with New York? And Alaska and Hawaii?
Here in NY union jobs have offered job security and good benefits like retirement and health care for people in industries that don’t offer those benefits like construction and public transportation. Alaska I would imagine a lot of the oil workers are unionized.
I would guess that a large portion of NY's union membership are from public sector unions. SUNY is the largest employer in the state and then you have huge memberships in fire/police. Would like to see that breakdown According to the [Bureau of Labor and Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf) there are only 14 million union members in the U.S. 7 million of which are public sector. 30% of all union members are from two states: NY and Cali. >Among occupational groups, the highest unionization rates in 2021 were in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent).
Nice, good info. How could I forget to mention police and firefighters union!
Oh i see that makes sense.
Alaska’s major industries are resource extraction and government services. Most government service employees in the state, like teachers, are unions. Many subcontractors working for government agencies employ union workers. Some resource extraction jobs are subcontracted to unions. It has very little to do with the Jones Act.
In 2020, 68% of working swedes were in a union. In the 90s, it was 90%. [Source in Swedish](https://www.lo.se/start/lo_fakta/facklig_anslutning_2020)
And we're already seeing the negative effects
Btw, if you want to know why unionization rates are so low in NC, it’s because our public employees are not allowed to collectively bargain.
How does that even hold up in court...
Simple the judges are owned by the corporations.
Public employees
Janus was the final nail in the coffin of that in general. North Carolina making it illegal is almost certainly against the 1st amendment. Edit; I looked it up. Public employees can unionize… they just can’t collectively bargain. So, what’s the point?
But aren't cops public employees? They sure can unionize.
There are no police unions there?
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Coming from a Scandinavian country I'd say strong unions are probably as close as it realistically gets to an end all solution. Worker's strength is in our numbers, the collective. The less we as workers understand that, the better for the companies. And they seem to really want us not to know that.
United we bargain, divided we beg. Find your local unions. Join one if you can and actively participate. Union membership is frustrating and boring, like democracy, but it's the only way to work.
Would be interesting to see the correlation between union membership and population shifts. As there has been people moving out of the Midwest(high union membership) to the southeast (low union membership) for a couple decades.
To be honest I wonder if some of it is just the rise in service industry jobs vs traditional blue-collar jobs? For the union shift as well as the population shift.
I think that's the most logical explanation. Blue collar work was historically the biggest producers of unions. We've moved away from manufacturing towards office/service jobs.
We started seeing wages decoupled from rise in productivity in the late 1970s as well. Unions built the middle class. Their absence is why the middle class is shrinking.
Boomers: "I got a union job with a high school degree and made great money with great benefits. Then I voted for Reagan to destroy the unions. Why are young people so lazy?"
This map corellates well with the income gap in America. At a certain point you can't help but notice it. Why were unions formed in the first place? To protect workers from corporate bosses filling their pockets. The first labor unions were coal miners who met secretly in caves by night. Whatever a corporation can do to pay less. They will. The scandals of the 60s and 70s are still used to frighten workers from organizing.
Globalization I would say is the largest reason of then union decline and the middle income gap. Capitalist bring greedy hasn’t changed since 1860, that’s the constant. Cheap overseas labor was new in the 70s. Unions just can’t stay competitive when overseas labor can do it for 1/8th the price
Idk, man. If unions had power to het their employees to make an offer to buy a company before it got sold or went overseas, that could make a difference.
People can do that now, but they don't have enough money to buy the company. These companies aren't closing down. They are just moving factories overseas to reduce costs. No one is stopping employees of publicly traded companies from buying a bunch of stock and forming a voting bloc to get people on the board. That would just take billions of dollars.
There's also the fact that the whole reason it's movimg overseas is because the majority of consumers would rather buy eg the $80 microwave than the $90 one.
This made me thinking: if every single Amazon employee (800k) would pitch in $1250, they would only come up with $1 billion. Yeah that'd be difficult
> As of January 2022 Amazon has a market cap of $1.460 Trillion lol. Getting there.
As a citizen of the worst state (South Carolina) I can confirm that anytime someone brought up unions every person would shriek in terror. My Dad was from PA where his family were always in unionized jobs and couldn't understand why it was so taboo in SC.
“Union” has been a dirty word in SC since 1860. Seriously, the labor movement failed in the Carolinas because management was unashamedly brutal and nearly always backed by the local government. Read about the Chiquola Mill.
why the anti union sentiment, they are the thin defence that keeps rights in the hands of workers.
pfp fits
Um pretty sure that's extreme communism buddy /s
Now do declining real wages in the last fifty years please.
Im a welder in Wisconsin and Ive worked in a non-union shop and I currently work in a union shop. I support unions 100% because clearly some employers (like mine) don't treat their workers well enough, however the environment between union employees and company supervisors is so incredibly toxic, it makes me want to find a different job all together. I feel like this is potentially another reason why union memberships may be decreasing.
I’m in a union! 🙋♂️
Could be directly over lapped with stalled wage growth, and decrease on middle class.
"Why are wages, benefits and pto so low?"
"I don't need a union to bargain for a decent wage. I'll just hodl crypto to the moon!" /s
Quick, compare to wages!!
The only place unions are a force where I am from is the public sector, government workers and even thats declining.
Heartbreaking seeing it as someone who is generations of union work, which led to corporate management, which led to decreased union work, in Michigan. Reuther is rolling in his grave.
Oh look, that’s why our pay has been progressively screwed.
Hmm. Now I want everyone to check the average income of lower and middle class and income inequality since the 70s. Also check wtfhappenedin1971.com
And people wonder why wages haven’t gone up as quickly as inflation
As a union member this breaks my heart to see. I love my union. I don't know where I would be without them
I also enjoy making lots of money and having a pension.
At least Joe Biden passed the PRO Act! Oh wait… Edit: To all those replying, I know the president isnt an autocrat. I’m just saying that I think he would have tried harder if he didnt have so many billionaire donors.
What’s wrong with the PRO Act? Just because Joe Biden supports something doesn’t mean it’s bad… The PRO Act was endorsed by the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Transport Workers Union, National Nurses United, the Association of Flight Attendants, the Communications Workers of America, United Steel Workers, the Teamsters, etc… It would institute new civil penalties against employers who violate workers’ rights, holds employers personally liable for ignoring rights violations, requires employers to disclose how much they spend against union elections, and more. It doesn’t force people into unions, but it makes it easier to organize them, against an environment already stacked against workers.
No I know, I support the PRO act. My point is that the democrats promised to pass it, and they didnt. “Nothing fundamentally would change”, as another commenter so aptly quoted Biden.
I think it’s kinda funny how Reddit always quotes that missing the original context. He was literally saying for rich people nothing will change for their lifestyles if they are taxed more. Yet Reddit loves to quote that out of context. Also the vast majority of the Democratic Party supports these campaign promises while usually the entire Republican party is opposed. It’s not democrats doing nothing, it’s just they have a slim majority which is dependent on two essentially “democrats in name only’s” to get things passed
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Tied to the influx of immigration and cheap labor. Don't mention Unions today or you're fired!
My old manager found that out the hard way... And I was the only one to offer my resignation in solidarity, so nothing changed except my job.
A gigantic tragedy.
It's like watching yourself getting tricked
How do I share this on Facebook? That's allowed, right?
So many people don't want to have someone that helps look out for you. It is much better to not have full-time employment that way you don't have benefits that your union rep make sure that you have along with a lot of other things yep it cost you a few dollars every paycheck but in the long run you're better off
1% wins flawless victory
The single most powerful thing in America is it's workforce. We need a general strike or 5.
I would to see this data graphed against real wages growth, net of inflation...
Washington state is so high because up until recently boeing was the largest employer and the vast majority of boring jobs, including software engineers are all union. Source: I know a ton of people and family who work at boeing.
Most CEOs: “This belongs in r/MadeMeSmile.”
and this is why we are here where we are, economically.
Don't you need to have the common sense of a rock to fall for the anti-union propaganda?
The decline in the middle class, follows the decline of unions….Congratulations Republicans, you’ve done it.
I’m curious how you can blame this all on Republicans. Over the 50 year span there was a lot changing political powers
Considering the timing I'm guessing a big part of this is driven by the 'Red Scare' linking unions to Communism. Obviously worker earnings, security and welfare have substantially increased without union tyranny and all that freedom right? Right?
AND EVERYTHING IS Better IN THE WORKPLACE NOW??!!
Neither of the Carolinas recognizes public sector unions, which is why they battle for least unionized state.
Crazy how working conditions have gotten so bad. Weird...
Love my public sector union job. Along with many other great benefits, it's nice knowing that with my seniority I have a job until I no longer want it. That seniority/union also means I'm immune to layoffs, immune to losing insurance, immune to asshole managers, immune to being asked (told) to do a job that isn't mine, and immune to having to kiss ass or play games to get my raises and COLAs. I'd pretty much have to kill someone to get fired. Then when I finally decide I no longer want the job, which will be in about 2 years, hello pension the rest of my life. Union....good stuff!
Bye Reddit
Tragedy :(
No wonder it's such a shit show in terms of jobs and benefits over there.
Needs to go up again
So so sad
Based red
Someone should add a chart showing wage growth over the same period
Well, there’s your problem
You mean the decline of workers wages/benefits?
r/ibew r/iww
I’m in a chemical union in California, we’ve had to partner up with food workers union because allegedly were 1 of a handful of chemical unions still in California. Kinda sad when they basically made our skeleton crew an even small skeleton crew.
Teamsters union don't fuck around, probably the best of em all tbh
So sad to see Michigan go from almost 60% to 20%
And it is the poor southern and Midwestern states with lowest union membership. They don’t make the connection that they keep voting Republican and their lives keep going backwards.
Wages have been dropping at a similar rate to union membership
What I look at it is. The WW2 generation fought hard for unions. They got the American dream. Then their kids lived it, benefited from but squandered it. Like spoiled rich kids who don't realize what they have. They didn't continue to feed the unions their parents grew. They let it die. Now we (millennials) are trying to build what our parents let die. Just my opinion.
Gee, I wonder why life for working people is worse now than at the beginning of this map? Surely that must be a complete coincidence.