What Unions?

By all accounts, the labor movement is no where near as powerful and as important as it was fifty years ago. It is not, however, dead, no matter what conventional wisdom says. Nor are unions lapsing into complete irrelevance, as implied in a column by Dan Walters published in today's Sacramento Bee.

Consider these numbers: In 1983, the state had just under 10 million private and public workers and 22 percent of them were members of unions, the vast majority being in the private sector. Today, nearly a quarter-century later, California's work force has expanded by about 50 percent to some 15 million, but union membership has dropped to under 17 percent and about half of them are government employees.

To put it another way, there were 2.1 million California union members in 1983 and there are only a few more, about 2.4 million, today. While California's unionization rate is still somewhat above the national average, were it not for unionization of public employees, thanks to another landmark labor relations law passed in the mid-1970s, unions would have almost disappeared in the state.

Why? Much of it stems from vast changes in the state's economy over the past few decades, from one dominated by union-heavy manufacturing to a hybrid "new economy" of trade, services and technology, none of which has strong union penetration.

Unions are arguably more politically influential than they were a quarter century ago because public-employee organization has meant the emergence of a relatively few, very large and very powerful unions, such as the Service Employees International Union, the California Teachers Association and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, with a direct stake in political decisions. [Emphasis added]

Now, Mr. Walters is correct in his assessment on why unions are, for the most part, considerably weaker in California than they had been: we don't "make" stuff anymore. Thirty years ago Los Angeles had three large tire manufacturing plants (Goodrich, Uniroyal, Goodyear). All three are long gone, to other states and to other countries. General Motors closed its Van Nuys plant. McDonnell-Douglas pretty much closed down its Long Beach operation. With the conclusion of the shuttle production program, Rockwell closed its Downey operation. While I don't have a detailed knowledge of the subject, I suspect most states have seen the same kind of exodus of union-heavy jobs.

Instead of working in plants, most Californians now work in offices, in restaurants and hotels, or in stores. Traditionally, those jobs have not been unionized, but that certainly doesn't mean they can't be. One of the unions mentioned by Mr. Walters, the SEIU, has been actively seeking to organize in just those venues, both in and out of the government sphere. That is one of the reasons why the SEIU and other more active unions split off from the AFL-CIO: they felt the old boys were more interested in lobbying Congress and in underwriting election campaigns than they were in organizing.

And the SEIU has met with some success, as hoteliers and the Los Angeles Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church have found. The new laborers, the hotel maids, the busboys, the gravediggers, the security guards, the sales clerks, have all opted for union representation, and for good reason. Many of them are characterized as "part-time," which traditionally means no benefits of any kind, and yet they are expected to work 40 hours or more at management's whim.

So, the death of the labor movement has been exaggerated. Unions still have their work cut out for them, but I think the bulk of the nation just might be receptive to a new flowering of unionism. At least I hope so.