People are finally realizing that their best chance to control their own ability to make money, earn promotions, and so on is to not allow a union to control it for them. In a union environment the best employee in the world ain't worth squat, especially if he's new and has no seniority. Why would a young kid who's a hard worker want any part of that?
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Figures released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the combined rate of private- and public-sector union membership was 11.1% last year, down from 11.3% the prior year. Membership in the private sector fell to a rate of 6.6% in 2014, from 6.7%, while public-sector representation rose slightly to 35.7%, from 35.3%.
Unions managed to collectively add about 41,000 members in the private sector, led by industries such as construction and leisure and hospitality, but it wasn’t enough to keep pace with total private-sector employment, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“The overall workforce is growing faster than the union workforce,” said Mr. Schmitt, who said unions gained members in part because of workers who got new jobs in unionized facilities.
“It’s bad news for the labor movement because it shows that they are not able to rebound. Essentially, they look like they’re stuck,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
Union membership rates declined over the year in 27 states and the District of Columbia. They rose in 18 states and were unchanged in five.
Michigan, a traditionally heavily unionized state at a center of U.S. manufacturing, underscores the labor movement’s challenge to rebuild in a changing economy. It fell to the 11th-most unionized state last year from the seventh the year before, dropping out of the top 10 category, where it had long held a place.
The membership rate in the public sector was once a bright spot for union growth, but has taken a hit in recent years amid the sector’s employment declines in cash-strapped states. Unions added a net of roughly 8,000 members, driven by gains at the local levels, primarily teachers. State-level membership saw big declines.
Overall, 7.2 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union last year, compared with 7.4 million employees in the private sector. The 14.6 million total was “little different” from 2013, according to Friday’s government report.
In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, there were 17.7 million union workers, and the rate was 20.1%.
William Spriggs, the chief economist for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation, was upbeat about the report. Despite “efforts to limit public-sector unions, membership numbers and union density grew,” he said, referring to Republican initiatives to scale back collective bargaining rights at state levels. “Despite the numbers being flat, the labor movement continued to be important,” Mr. Spriggs said.
Others said that Friday’s figures reflected a growing inability of unions to attract members in a changing employment landscape.
“They don’t know how to design their appeals to a changing workforce,” said Mr. Chaison at Clark University. “They’ll complain about employer opposition, but employer opposition has always been there,” he said.
U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez used the report to promote the utility of unions in narrowing income inequality.
The report “confirms what we’ve always known: that belonging to a union makes a powerful difference in people’s lives,” said Mr. Perez, who cited data showing unionized workers have median weekly earnings of $970 compared with $763 for workers not in a union.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/membersh...014-1422028558