The Star Press (Muncie, Indiana), September 3, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 The Star Press (Muncie, IN)
All Rights Reserved
The Star Press (Muncie, Indiana)

September 3, 2006 Sunday

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 1F

HEADLINE: Labor's Silent Rebound

BYLINE: KEITH ROYSDON kroysdon@muncie.gannett.com

BODY:
As Labor Day approaches, labor union members are probably justified in feeling like changes in industry -- as well as society itself -- are pushing them to the brink of extinction.
Local factories that once employed thousands of union members are either closed, like the former Chevrolet-Muncie plant, or laying off workers, like in recent weeks at BorgWarner Automotive, where fewer than 1,000 workers remain.
But despite those events, the number of unionized workers in Indiana is actually growing.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership in Indiana grew by more than 11 percent from 2004 to 2005.
In Indiana, 346,000 of the state's 2.7 million workers were union members, compared to 311,000 in 2004.
Among Midwestern states, Indiana was joined by Iowa in seeing a substantial gain, while Illinois grew by only 2 percent and Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin saw decreases in union membership.
As traditional union strongholds like the auto industry suffer from declining numbers, labor unions are increasingly turning to other professions -- including some unlikely ones -- to recruit union members, a Cornell University labor history professor told The Star Press.
'Watching the numbers'
In the days before the Labor Day holiday, the leadership of United Auto Workers Local 287 was keeping a watchful eye on the potential for changes at BorgWarner Automotive.
In August, about 81 of more than 700 union workers at BorgWarner were laid off. The plant -- which makes transfer cases used in Ford vehicles -- reduced production in response to cutbacks and closings nationwide announced by Ford.
Jerry French, president of Local 287, said last week that he had not been notified of further layoffs "at this time. They're constantly watching the numbers."
Doug Owenby, plant manager for BorgWarner, did not return messages left by The Star Press on July 12, Aug. 19 and Aug. 29.
"It's not just us," French said. "It's manufacturing as a whole."
French is correct in assessing the impact of manufacturing downturns on labor unions, which made the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showing an increase in Hoosier union membership surprising.
Moving into new sectors
Norma Malcolm, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Chicago, couldn't offer an immediate explanation as to why union membership increased in Indiana between 2004 and 2005.
"Union membership has been dropping nationwide," she said.
The percentage of wage and salary workers nationwide who were union members decreased to 12.5 percent in 2005 from 20.1 percent in 1983. Although it's likely that membership percentages were higher in previous years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have comparable union data for the years before 1983.
Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University in New York, believes she knows what's happening to union membership.
"I don't know exactly what's happening in Indiana," DeVault said. "But my guess is that what those BLS numbers show is that unions are finally realizing that they're not going to get more members by organizing the same auto workers over and over again. They have to move into the growing sectors of the economy, more service sector jobs."
DeVault said unions have emphasized efforts to organize hotel and restaurant workers, for example, as well as janitorial staffs for office buildings.
"There's also an increase in the people we would have thought of as professionals joining unions," she said. "They're more often employed by corporations like financial service workers and medical personnel, like aides in hospitals. This goes all the way up to some doctors groups. In New York state, the podiatrist association a couple of years ago affiliated with a union."
DeVault said unions have accomplished much over the decades but also failed in some areas.
"They created the American middle class," she said. "The idea that you should be able to get out of high school, get a good blue collar job that pays enough to raise a family, buy a house, that whole image created in the 1940s and 1950s."
But unions, she added, have also been slow to accept foreign-born workers.
"It's taken unions a long time to figure out where workers are in the United States today," she said. "They're not where they were. Because unions are institutions, they change very slowly."
Contact news reporter Keith Roysdon
at 213-5828.