The Future of Private Sector Unionism in the United States

James T. Bennett, Bruce E. Kaufman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315499079
• Print ISBN:
  9780765608529
• Subtopic: Business General

A study of the long-term decline of the labour movement in America, exploring the outlook for labour and unions in the 21st century. There are insights from contributors from a range of backgrounds - academic and non-academic, domestic and foreign, pro- and anti-union.

1

Introduction

James T. Bennett and Bruce E. Kaufman

As we enter the first year of the twenty-first century, it seems particularly appropriate to take stock of the major institutions and practices that have defined American industrial relations during the past century and pause for reflection and conjecture about the future.

Although industrial relations is a broad, multifaceted subject, over most of the twentieth century the institution of trade unionism has been the center of research and policy debate in the field. A number of reasons account for this focus.

Unionism, for example, has always been controversial and has engendered strong opinions both pro and con. To supporters, trade unionism helps level the playing field in wage determination, ensures that employees get adequate working conditions, provides democracy and self-government in the workplace, and gives workers a voice in the nation’s political process. Critics, however, hold a different view. As they see it, unions possess monopoly-like market power that results in inflated wages and a host of other economic distortions, rely on coercion and abridgement of individual liberty to gain their ends, and too often are corrupt and/or nondemocratic in their internal governance practices.

Unions also command attention and stir debate because of their important impact on labor markets, employers, and the polity. Research shows that unions have a wide range of effects on the operation and outcomes of labor markets. Unions typically raise wages on average 15–25 percent, increase the share of compensation paid as employee benefits, reduce hours of full-time work and restrict part-time work, decrease wage dispersion and income inequality, reduce employee quits and terminations, and in some cases raise productivity and in other cases lower it. Unions also have a dramatic effect on employers and firm-level industrial relations practices. Employment practices in unionized firms, for example, are formalized in written collective bargaining contracts, and these contracts typically restrict the range of management discretion and require joint consultation and agreement on significant changes in employment policy. Unionized firms are also much more likely to have a formal grievance process and provision for binding arbitration of employment disputes. Moreover, unions also have a significant influence on the nation’s political process through legislative lobbying, financial contributions to candidates and political parties, and get-out-the-vote campaigns.

Finally, unionism is a powerful challenge to the existing power structure and regime of property rights in both the economic and political spheres. Unions use collective bargaining to redistribute control and resources from capital owners to workers, significantly restrict management decisionmaking rights in firms, expand the workplace protections and entitlements of employees, and reallocate income from profits to wages. Unionism is also a potent social and political movement that purportedly seeks to advance the cause of workers through a broad array of legislative initiatives, institutional reforms, and community activism.

For these and other reasons, labor unions have been and still are an important economic and social force in the American economy and a significant area of academic scholarship. Recent trends, however, have not been kind to unions, nor to the field of industrial relations that studies them.

Figure 1.1 shows union density (union membership as a proportion of nonagricultural employment) in the United States for the years 1900 to 2000, as well as density for the private and public sectors from 1950 to 2000. (Before 1950 public sector union membership was quite small.) Figure 1.2 shows the same trends for union membership.

The dominant pattern that emerges from Figure 1.1 is the half-century rise in union density from 1900 to the early 1950s, followed by a significant decline in the succeeding half-century. Union membership in Figure 1.2 shows the same sharp upward trend for the first half of the century, but then continues to grow slowly until finally cresting in the late 1970s, after which it too declines. In 1900 only 7 percent of nonagricultural workers belonged to unions, comprising slightly less than 1 million workers. Over the next five decades, membership and density increased substantially, particularly in three “spurt” periods around World War I, the New Deal years of the 1930s, and World War II. At mid-century, union density had increased 450 percent to one-third of the work force, and 14 million American workers now held union cards.

From the vantage point of mid-century, unions had made remarkable gains and collective bargaining was firmly established as the dominant method of wage determination and work force governance in the United States. And most experts at the time predicted that this pattern would continue well into the future. But history proved otherwise. Density peaked in 1953 at 33 percent of the work force, declined slowly for the next two decades, and then fell more sharply in the 1980s and 1990s, reaching the lowest level in six decades in the year 2000—14 percent. Although union membership continued to grow until the late 1970s, it then dropped by 5 million during the next two decades, leaving union membership in 2000 at nearly the same level (16 million) it had reached in the mid-1950s.

Figure 1.1

Union Density, 1900–2000

Sources: Data for 1900–1983: Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin, Union Sourcebook, 1st ed., Appendix A (West Orange, NJ: Industrial Relations Data Information Services, 1985). Total density for 1984–2000: Barry Hirsch, David Macpherson, and Wayne Vromen, “State Level Estimates of Union Density, 1964-Present,” Monthly Labor Review, Figure 1 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Forthcoming). Other data for 1984–2000: Barry Hirsch and David Macpherson, Union Membership and Earnings Data Book, 2000 ed., Tables 1a, 1c, and 1f (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 2000). The base for total density is nonagricultural employment. The data series for 1900–1983 and 1984–2000 were spliced together by the authors.

However, the trends in membership and density since the 1950s mask highly divergent developments in the private and public sectors. Unionism in the public sector increased dramatically over this period, while it contracted sharply in the private sector. In the 1950s, only slightly more than 10 percent of government workers belonged to unions, but expansion of collective bargaining rights to federal, state, and local employees in the intervening years fueled a major surge in union growth. As a result, public sector membership grew from 1 million to 6 million, and public sector density jumped to 40 percent by the mid-1970s—a level then largely maintained up to 2000.

Figure 1.2

Union Membership, 1900–2000

Sources: See Figure 1.1.

Unionism in the private sector, on the other hand, has severely eroded. While one in four private sector workers belonged to unions in the mid-1970s, this ratio fell to less than one in ten by the year 2000. Indeed, it is noteworthy that private sector density had fallen to a level in 2000 (9 percent) that was quite close to the density figure that existed exactly 100 years ago at the start of the twentieth century (7 percent). Union membership in the private sector also reflected a marked deterioration, falling by nearly 5 million since the early 1970s.

The steady decline in union density and membership in the last part of the twentieth century raises a host of questions about not only the future of organized labor in America, but also the nature of the employer-employee relationship, the workings and outcomes of labor markets, and national issues of economic competitiveness and social justice. The answers to the latter set of questions, important as they are, hinge crucially on the answer to the antecedent one—what will happen to union density and membership in the first part of the twenty-first century? Accordingly, it is the question “what is the future of unions in America?” that we address in this volume. Since economic conditions and labor laws are quite different in many respects in the public and private sectors—reflected in the highly disparate trends in unionization in the two sectors—we limit the focus in this volume to the private sector. Since private sector employment accounts for approximately 85 percent of jobs in the United States, our analysis covers most employers and employees.

Overview of the Volume

To assess the future of private sector unionism in the United States, we commissioned fourteen papers from a distinguished group of academics and practitioners. We, the editors, also contributed two individual papers, as well as a concluding chapter that evaluates and summarizes the evidence on the prospects for future union growth.

In assembling the contributed papers for this volume, we followed several guidelines. The first was to obtain papers from authors with national and international reputations for expertise on the subject of unions and union growth.

A second guideline was to feature both academic and practitioner perspectives. Although the former is emphasized, the practitioner perspective is ably represented by Edward Potter, a management spokesman, and Nancy Mills, a labor spokeswoman. A concerted effort was made to obtain additional authors representing organized labor, but this proved unsuccessful.

A third rule was to promote a diversity of viewpoints and disciplinary perspectives. Toward this end, we invited contributions from people who have taken positions both favorable to and critical of unions, as well as a number of authors who are widely regarded as “middle of the road.” Also, we chose academic authors from a wide range of disciplines and fields, including economics, political science, management, law, and industrial relations.

And, finally, while the focus of the volume is on American unionism, we sought to promote an international dialogue by obtaining contributions from several prominent authors outside the United States.

The preponderance of the evidence and commentary contained in this volume paints a relatively pessimistic picture for the near-term growth prospects of unions in the private sector of the American economy. Indeed, should present trends in union organizing success, attrition of jobs in the union sector, and growth of employment in the nonunion sector continue, private sector union density will fall below 5 percent sometime in the 2010s—a level of “deunionization” not seen since the last years of the nineteenth century.

The future of private sector unions in the United States may not be as bleak as this, however. As several of the chapters in this volume also point out, predictions of continued union decline rest on a presumption of “other things equal”—that the present legal regime governing union joining remains unchanged and the country avoids major social or economic dislocations that precipitate widespread labor problems and unrest. Such an assumption proved spectacularly wrong at several points in the twentieth century and may well prove equally inaccurate in the twenty-first.

The future course of private sector unionism in the United States is thus inherently uncertain, although on net the short-run prospects appear relatively gloomy. We examine and explain the reasons for this gloomy forecast in much greater detail in the concluding chapter of this volume. But before turning to it, we encourage readers to delve into the sixteen chapters that form the heart of the volume, for each is full of interesting insights, new data, and provocative conclusions.

2

The Future of Private Sector Unions in the U.S.

Seymour Martin Lipset and Ivan Katchanovski

I. Introduction

A long and continuous decline in union density has characterized the U.S. union movement since the mid-1950s. Union density dropped from almost a third, 32.5 percent of nonagricultural employees, in 1953 to less than a fourth, 23.2 percent, in 1980 and about a seventh, 14.0 percent, in 1999 (Troy, 1986, p. 87; Union Members, 2000). The actual number of members started to decline at the end of the 1970s—from 21 million in 1979 to 16.5 million in 1999 (Hirsch and MacPherson, 1998; Union Members, 2000). Since 1995, John Sweeney’s new administration at the AFL-CIO has been devoting considerable resources to reverse the trend, but union density has not increased.

The decline in union membership is largely a private sector phenomenon. Union density among the privately employed fell from 35.7 percent of nonagricultural workers in 1953 to 9.5 percent in 1999, while public sector membership shows the opposite trend (Figure 2.1). Density in the latter increased from 11.6 percent in 1953 to 37.3 percent in 1999 (Troy, 1986, p. 82; Union Members, 2000).¹ A major turning point for public sector unionism occurred in 1962 when President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 encouraged collective bargaining for federal employees (Western, 1997, p. 72). Most of the states followed suit and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Future of Private Sector Unions in the U.S.
• 3. Accounting for the Decline of Unions in the Private Sector, 1973–1988
• 4. Twilight for Organized Labor
• 5. Information Technology, Unions, and the New Organization: Challenges and Opportunities for Union Survival
• 6. Private Sector Union Density and the Wage Premium: Past, Present, and Future
• 7. Unions as Value-Adding Networks: Possibilities for the Future of U.S. Unionism
• 8. The Fall and Future of Unionism in Construction
• 9. Learning from Each Other: A European Perspective on American Labor
• 10. Labor’s Love Lost? Changes in the U.S. Environment and Declining Private Sector Unionism
• 11. Human Resource Management Practices and Worker Desires for Union Representation
• 12. New Strategies for Union Survival and Revival
• 13. Labor Unions: Victims of Their Own Political Success?
• 14. Mandatory Agency Shop Laws as an Explanation of Canada-U.S. Union Density Divergence
• 15. Intensity of Management Resistance: Understanding the Decline of Unionization in the Private Sector
• 16. Strategy for Labor
• 17. The Future of U.S. Private Sector Unionism: Did George Barnett Get It Right After All?
• 18. Conclusion: The Future of Private Unionism in the U.S.—Assessment and Forecast
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index