I am, by sentiment, by heritage and by political perspective, a fan of the organized labor movement --which, as I see it, improves the lives of its members and the content of the body politic. As a result, each Labor Day seems an occasion more for nostalgia than celebration. My ideas about the decline of the labor movement are confused and the solutions, tentative.

The proportion of the US work force which is represented by union continues its decline year-to-year. The sectors in which union-membership growth occurs at all, public employment and health care, are largely outside of the profit-making sector of the economy so that those employers are somewhat less frantic and use fewer scorched-earth “preventive labor relations” tactics. Retail giants like Wal-Mart and Starbucks fight unions tooth and nail, mostly with success. For a thoughtful, but somewhat dated, essay by labor educator-gadlfy Harry Kelber on unions’ very long losing streak click here.

Non-union auto assembly, unimaginable as I was growing up, is growing. The NY Times had a Labor Day story about the difficulties encountered by the United Auto Workers enlisting Toyota workers which lays out the difficulties faced by the labor movement as a whole.

Union leaders explain the decline in union membership and their inability to organize growth industries by pointing out the management-oriented decisions of the National Labor Relations Board and the intimidation employers can wield under the National Labor Relations Act in the course of representation elections. For example, UNITE-HERE President Bruce Raynor, one of labor's more far-sighted and progressive leaders, writing in the DMI Blog, attributes the decline in union membership to employer hostility and the stacked-against-workers processes of the NLRB. In general, his prescription, like that of the AFL-CIO is the Employee Free Choice Act the proposed statute which has not yet gotten through Congress. (It got 51 of a needed 60 votes on a Senate cloture motion) While I agree that the EFCA would improve unions’ chances and diminish employers’ opportunity to intimidate workers, I wonder if Raynor’s analysis of the decline of unions can be right. After all, the current union movement grew to represent a larger portion of the work-force in the face of significantly more violent and repressive employer-action.

Raynor recognizes that significant immigration reform would help. Pitting undocumented immigrants against other workers harms everyone. But immigration reforms which would regularize the presence of undocumented workers does not seems to me to be on the agenda of anybody. Exporting US farms to Mexico now seems like an viable option for farm employers who cannot rely on being able to hire undocumented farm workers in the US and who pay $11/day in Mexico as compared to $9/hour in California. In NYC, non-union construction contractors, formerly a contradiction in terms, hire illegal immigrants for dangerous work in substandard conditions yet construction-trades unions, to this day, have made no efforts that I have seen to organize the unorganized.

In addition the EFCA, union advocates have been urging significant improvements by the NLRB like allowing a union to represent a minority of workers . How on earth Mr. Bush’s appointees to the Board can be expected to favor employees is completely beyond my understanding.

As a result of employers’ increasing reluctance to encumber themselves further with medical, retirement, and vacation responsibilities, many have turned to hiring “free lance” contractors who get no benefits and who can be terminated without any unemployment comp. consequences. It seems obvious to me that these free lancers are much more vulnerable than employees. Courts have routinely held them to be significantly less protected by labor laws because of their “contractor” status. Sara Horowitz, Executive Directors of the Freelancers Unions writes about the difficult straits her members and others face in this Gotham Gazette essay but so far as I can read articulates no strategy for extending Labor Law protections to her members and others similarly situated.

It seems clear to me that labor unions do not, by themselves, bring enough power to the political arena to change current anti-union, anti-employee law and regulation. Therefore, I feel that the only long term solution to the decline of Unions is for those experimental alliances between them and other citizen organizations to be expanded. In my book such efforts as the NY Working Families Party with many unions and citizen groups have good potential to increase the effectiveness of all. Other New York groups include the Alliance For Quality Education which mobilizes teachers & parents, the Apollo Alliance on energy conservation. Unfortunately, these are guesses and intuitions. These alliances are extremely fragile. Support by ACORN and construction unions for Ratnerville, for example, drive them away from other natural allies. The deal struck by the UFT and some of its allies on the current (and to my mind) irrational school reorganization by Mr. Bloomberg, seems short-sighted and destructive. By contrast, at least at present, the congestion-pricing struggle seems to have forged an alliance among transit and environmental advocates, business and labor leaders.

I do wish I knew a better, or even a good, answer.

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