Labor unions in the United States

Union Membership Decline

In the United States, union membership has been declining for some time, with more open shops and with the employees of a number of companies voting not to form a union when asked. The decline was stopped for a time, but it then increased as the result of a number of factors, including the effects of globalization, decisions not to unionize in some shops where there are no clear disagreements between management and employees, damage done in some industries by strike activity, and a newly developing economy in which more people serve as consultants in some industries and do not have direct and permanent employment.

In 1999, it was noted that the percentage of Americans in unions stood at 13.9%, unchanged from 1998, suggesting that labor unions were managing to replace union members at the same rate they were being lost. It was also noted that membership in unions had been in decline since 1973, when about 24% of Americans were members of unions. To counter the decline, labor leaders had worked to offset declines in manufacturing-based union membership by organizing service-sector and public-sector workers and by reaching out to women and minorities. It was noted as well that "some union members see immigrants as individuals who take jobs away from American workers, are paid low wages and undercut working conditions for all workers" (Burns 1), indicating one of the reasons why union members are as angry about illegal immigration as they are and also why they oppose both legal immigration to bring in foreign workers and outsourcing to send jobs to foreign countries.

More recently, reports suggest that union membership has declined to 12.0% in 2006, down from 12.5% in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some reports place the number even lower. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the following:

That workers in the public sector have a union membership rate nearly five times that of those in the private sector

That education, training, and library occupations have the highest unionization rate among all occupations at 37%

That the unionization rate is higher for men than for women

That black workers are more likely to be union members than white, Asian, or Hispanic workers ("Union Members in 2006" 1).

Workers join unions when doing so gives them an advantage in the marketplace, so that collective bargaining can increase salary and benefits and protect workers from unwarranted firing and other actions by management. To a degree, the nature of the competition also affects the decision to join a union, and if other companies in a given industry are unionized and have higher benefits as a result, employees of non-unionized companies may seek union membership to gain the same advantage. On the other hand, when jobs are scarce or, as is currently true, changing in various ways, workers may not be as eager to form a union, seeing such an action as itself perilous. Among the forces affecting workers today are globalization, outsourcing, management efforts to depress wages, the loss of entire industries to off-shore operations, and other actions that make jobs less secure and union membership less attractive. The latter does not mean that workers would not benefit from union membership but only that they may fear retaliation and loss of the job they have if they try to create a union.

Some companies indeed actively seek to prevent the formation of unions, and the largest retail employer in the United States, Wal-Mart, is such an organization. Indeed, Wal-Mart has been criticized for its destructive effect on various communities, for the way it seeks to control the business operations of vendors and suppliers, as wellas for its effect on the labor market. Whether Wal-Mart intends it or not, the decisions the company makes have an influence on wages and working conditions across the country, but it seems that the company does know what it is doing and the problems it causes to others:

The company has prospered by elevating one goal above all others: cutting prices relentlessly. U.S. economists say its tightfistedness has not only boosted its own bottom line, but also helped hold down the inflation rate for the entire country (Goldman and Cleeland A1).

As critics note, however, Wal-Mart's practices have also "hastened the flight of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas" (Goldman and Cleeland A1) while not paying many of its own employees enough to support a family. The rapaciousness of the company has also been cited by many critics:

The company set out to obliterate its competition. At the Bentonville headquarters, Wal-Mart still displays the pictures of the heads of its 24 major food and merchandise chain competitors, each framed like an FBI "Wanted" poster. It now builds one new store every 42 hours (Freeman and Ticknor para. 8).

The business methods of Wal-Mart are like an exaggeration of what capitalism should be, concentrating entirely on increasing profits with little regard for any social role the business might have. The company claims to be a good citizen and offers some charity work and community awards as proof, but for this company, such efforts seem little more than public relations, without much real concern for anything but higher profits and lower costs. Many communities have been harmed by Wal-Mart, and many others are now concerned that they might be if they allow Wal-Mart to gain a foothold.

Foreign outsourcing is another major issue, and Wal-Mart also engages in this practice. In industrial nations, the consumer has gained more and more power over what goods are made and sold. Businesses pay attention to what the consumer wants when designing and manufacturing goods, seeking always to provide what the consumer will buy. This also means improving products for increased sales and doing so on the basis of research showing what the consumer really wants. This means business goes beyond providing the staples and shows a proliferation of goods and an accompanying decrease in price to attract more customers. Increased choice is a watchword in the industrialized nations of the world, and this also means increased choice for less-developed nations as well, assuming they can participate by buying some of these goods. The desire to reduce costs and improve products and services has been met by business with outsourcing to less costly parts of the world, thus adding to the globalization process while bringing in more and more areas as part of a worldwide economy.

This process started with manufacturing jobs, but it has spread to other types of jobs as well. The emerging global economy is shaped by a number of forces, and the primary force shaping the new economy is the same one that shaped the old, that being inequality among nations in both economic and political terms. In the new paradigm, the underdeveloped nations have some advantage in terms of being able to provide new opportunities for the more developed nations for investment presumably benefiting each. The ongoing outsourcing of service jobs to regions like India is an example, for the fact that India has a large English-speaking population gives it a competitive advantage not matched by China or Latin America or other emerging nations in the world. Those nations have different advantages, such as the huge population in China, which provides both a large workforce and a huge market to be catered to by the West; and the large number of unemployed in much of Latin America also provides a workforce that will work for less in manufacturing jobs. In a sense, these countries are able to turn what was once a disadvantage into an advantage, while the developed nations benefit with lower costs and through the development of a new market.