Why union membership remains low

The number of workers belonging to unions in the United States grew by 428,000 last year to 16,100,000, mostly thanks to increased membership in the ranks of teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other local government employees.

The 2008 union membership rate in the public sector generally – 36.8 percent –stood in stark contrast to the rate in the private sector – 7.6 percent. In other words, government workers were nearly five times more likely to belong to a union than employees in the private sector.

Collective bargaining contracts covered about 1,700,000 workers who themselves refrained from joining a union. These holdouts were distributed about half and half between the public and private sectors.

Exhaustive data on union membership is contained in the latest annual report, “Union Members in 2008,” issued by the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), based on monthly household surveys conducted by the Census Bureau.

The BLS report, which covers 12 pages, does not explain why unions are stronger in the public than in the private sector. Numerous surveys, however, show not only that private business is much more unreceptive to unions than government agencies, but also that U.S. law permits companies to put that attitude into action.

A new Human Rights Watch briefing paper focuses on labor law and practice in the U.S. private sector, without drawing a contrast with the public sector. After reading the 12-page report, however, I cannot help marveling that even 8,255,000 of private sector workers still belong to unions.

U.S. labor law “is weak and riddled with loopholes,” and employers take advantage of that weakness in the law and in its enforcement to vitiate the right of workers to organize. The HRW briefing paper supports those two findings with detailed evidence. For example:

-- Penalties for firing pro-union workers and for otherwise breaching the law are so small that employers dismiss them as a worthwhile cost of doing business.
-- The government run election procedures by which workers vote for or against a union are heavily slanted against the union.
-- Even if workers succeed in winning an election, an employer can stall reaching a collective bargaining agreement to the point of making the victory meaningless.

HRW is among a growing number of organizations supporting Congressional approval of the Employee Free Choice Act. For Human Rights Watch, that passage is “a human rights imperative.”

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New U.S. Export: Union-Busting

In the United States we do not bump off union leaders. No, we are somewhat more humane. We let professional teams of lawyers, management consultants, psychologists, and others subvert union leaders and their organizations through sophisticated techniques of union-busting.

Pardon me. They call it union avoidance. Either way, its practitioners collect an estimated $4,000,000,000 a year from employers to keep unions out of work places and to remove those already there, all by using activities that are legal, quasi-legal, and extra-legal, as well as illegal. They can resort to illegal practices because the penalties are so minimal.

So great is their success in the United States that the union busters are expanding their operations off shore, particularly to the United Kingdom. That troubles the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), the national labor union center that partners with the AFL-CIO. On February 12 leaders of the two national centers formalized an agreement to work together to counter this transatlantic anti-union offensive.

Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, explains: “The underhanded tactics employed in the shadowy world of the union-busting consultant are improving increasingly attractive to a handful employers in the UK.”

“Union Avoidance Consultants: a Threat to the Rights of British Workers,” a study by John Logan, of the London School of Management, was released to coincide with the new cooperation. Logan writes that the overwhelming majority of employers in the United States hire outside consultants when they are faced with an employee move to organize.

Among their techniques, these outsiders:

• Caution workers not to trust unions: unions "get between” management and its employees.
• Concentrate on spreading fear in employee ranks, charging that unions are corrupt and interested only in dues, that jobs aren’t safe under a union, that unions can’t require the boss to give a pay increase, that benefits including vacations and insurance are in peril, and so on and on, in every possible variation.
• Take full advantage of the legalized monopoly that they and the employer have in workplace communication with employees, including compulsory meetings and one-on-one interviews designed to put full pressure on individuals.

At present, such activity in the UK is much smaller in scale and intensity than in the United States. Yet, as Logan says, the new export development should still be worrisome to “anyone who believes in the workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively.”

Let me expand on that point. Such activity should worry anyone anywhere who believes in a free society. Unions in the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere have proven their value in acting as a cushion between the individual and the state. Along with other private organizations, including business firms, labor unions build and maintain a living social structure – a vigorous civil society – that creates limits on the power of government and performs many necessary economic and social functions more closely to the people than the government can.

If more Americans understood the need for a flourishing civil society, union-busters would drastically lose their effectiveness. As things are, exterminating unions is an occupation widely seen by professional peers and many others as legitimate, not one to be shunned, scorned, and shamed.

Chances are not great that the new U.S.-UK initiative will bring an end to what Business Week has called “one of the most successful anti-union wars ever.” But it must be tried, in hopes that other groups of this democratic nation, including at least a few leading employers, will join it.

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But -- do workers still want unions?

If you’re wondering, read the report, “Do Workers Still Want Unions? More Than Ever,” published by the Economic Policy Institute. The author, economist Richard B. Freeman, compiles 16 pages of evidence that they do.

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Bangladesh 's Anti-Labor Crackdown

The government of Bangladesh, never friendly to worker organizations and their supporters, on January 24 arrested Mehedi Hasan, a field investigator of the Worker Rights Consortium, and kept him in shackles when a lawyer and family members were allowed brief visits.

Hasan, a Bangladeshi national, was in the midst of checking worker rights violations in the garment industry in Dhaka. His organization monitors labor rights compliance on behalf of 178 universities and colleges that market apparel and other products made in Bangladesh and other countries.

Security forces seized Hasan's computer, which contained information from interviews held with workers away from factories. This leads to concerns for the workers' safety.

Hasan's arrest is part of wave of government harassment of unions and their advocates. A Bangladeshi staff person of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's Dhaka office was also recently arrested while participating in a worker rights clinic.


In June last year the AFL-CIO filed a petition with the U.S. Trade Representative to withdraw some of Bangladesh's trade benefits unless it ends its most glaring abuses of labor rights. (Scroll down to "Bangladesh's Workers on a 17-Year Treadmill" at http://www.senser.com/008-01.htm.)

For at least 17 years now, the AFL-CIO and other organizations have been pressing USTR to invoke U.S. trade law sanctions because of Bangladesh's non-compliance with that law. USTR has rejected each petition. The current AFL-CIO petition is still pending.
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