The Washington Times, September 1, 2008, Monday

The Washington Times

September 1, 2008, Monday

HEADLINE: Unions gain optimism on political front; Movement reverses long decline

BYLINE: By David M. Dickson, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

BODY:

For the first time in a quarter century, union workers this year will have good reason to celebrate Labor Day.

After decades of declining rolls, union membership increased last year as a percentage of the total work force. But organized labor's near-term future looks worrisome as the U.S. economic slowdown threatens to evolve into an outright recession, accelerating the loss of manufacturing jobs that have been a union bulwark for decades.

This year, Labor Day falls between the Democratic and Republican national conventions. That juxtaposition raises some crucial questions: Will the labor movement be able to build upon the political success it achieved in the 2006 congressional elections by expanding the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in November? And will labor help elect a Democrat who likely would be the most pro-labor advocate in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt?

If organized labor achieves those goals, then its long-term future would look much rosier than its recent past.

Last year's 311,000 person increase in union membership represented the largest annual jump since 1983, the U.S. Department of Labor reported. As a result, the nation's 15.7 million union workers increased their share of the labor force for the first time since 1983, when employees represented by organized labor accounted for more than 20 percent of the work force.

In 2007, after decades of decline, labor's share of workers edged up to 12.1 percent from 12 percent a year earlier. Last year, 7.5 percent of private-sector workers were union members, down from the 35 percent level that prevailed during the 1950s. Nearly 36 percent of public-sector workers were union members in 2007, up from 10 percent in the early 1960s.

"Last year's increase was not a temporary spike," said Chris Chafe, executive director of Change to Win, the 6.2-million-member labor federation that was created in 2005 after several of the nation's largest unions broke away from the AFL-CIO. "Manufacturing workers have lost millions of jobs under [President] Bush, and many other sectors believe they have been in a recession for more than a year," he said.

What happened last year was "the beginning of an upward trend, a watershed moment" in the American labor movement, Mr. Chafe said.

Richard Hurd, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., noted that unions increased their share of health care workers from 12.5 percent to 13.5 percent last year. Countering that advance, however, were layoffs at the Big Three automakers, he said, which have been shedding jobs for years and likely will continue to do so.

"Overall," Mr. Hurd said, "labor is pretty stable now, but we are moving into a recession, which will be difficult for unions."

Economists have been debating all year whether the U.S. economy will enter a recession or whether one began earlier this year. What is indisputable is that the economy shed nearly 500,000 jobs, including more than 270,000 in manufacturing, during the first seven months of this year.

Many of the manufacturing jobs lost were union jobs.

Over the past several decades, as the U.S. economy has become increasingly service-oriented, manufacturing's share of the economy has declined. That has significantly contributed to the declining share of union jobs in the work force.

The decline in union membership has had severe economic consequences not just for organized labor, but for most rank-and-file workers, said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute. "With only 7.5 percent of the private-sector work force unionized today, it is very tough for unions to set wages in any of the industries," he said.

Mr. Bernstein recently examined the productivity and compensation trends of the past 60 years, when union membership in the private sector declined from roughly 35 percent to 7.5 percent. Between 1947 and 1979, when productivity increased an average of 2.5 percent per year, compensation (wages and benefits) for rank-and-file workers rose 2.4 percent per year after inflation. Between 1979 and 2007, when annual productivity averaged 1.9 percent, compensation increased 0.2 percent per year as hourly wages declined and benefits increased.

These productivity and compensation trends represent "Exhibit A in the loss of bargaining power and clout for many in the work force," he said.

Mr. Bernstein's views about power and clout are not universal, however.

"Unions have extraordinary power because in a majority of states, unions can force employees to pay dues in order to keep their jobs," said Patrick Semmens, director of legal information at the National Right to Work Committee.

In recent years, globalization has contributed to the declining share of unionized workers. Increasing globalization of the economy has forced U.S. manufacturers to compete with foreign factories that pay their lower-skilled workers a small fraction of U.S. wages. Meanwhile, the computer revolution has produced an explosion of capital-intensive, labor-saving technology. These twin trends have reduced the demand for factory workers.

Between 2000 and 2007, U.S. factories shed 3.4 million jobs, even as manufacturing output increased by 8 percent. This employment downsizing disproportionately affected unionized workers, further reducing the ranks of organized labor.

To buttress their numbers in an era of declining manufacturing employment, unions have increased their organizing efforts in service industries, where, in addition to the health care sector, they have made notable gains among janitors and child care workers.

Big Labor is also looking overseas, where it has responded to the pressures of globalization by embarking on a global campaign of its own. In July, the United Steelworkers merged with the largest labor organization in Britain and Ireland.

"Unions are now looking toward a global labor movement," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell, where she studies organizing techniques.

She cited American steelworkers, who led an effort of rubber-worker unions around the world to pressure Firestone to reach an agreement with Liberian rubber workers. Working with nongovernmental organizations, Unite Here - the textile, hotel and restaurant workers union - helped to organize textile workers in Indonesia, Cambodia and Bangladesh. The American union also has negotiated with European-owned retailers, distribution centers and other companies in the worldwide supply chain for apparel and textiles.

Organized labor's primary political goal this year is to replace Mr. Bush with Sen. Barack Obama, who compiled a 98 percent lifetime AFL-CIO vote rating during his first three years in the U.S. Senate. (Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, received a zero AFL-CIO rating last year and has a lifetime rating of 16 percent.)

A filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which would require the Democratic Party to gain nine seats in November, would be next on Big Labor's agenda. "We'll be very close to 60 if we don't get there," said Mr. Chafe of Change to Win, which has been working closely with the AFL-CIO, its rival labor federation, to achieve that goal.

If Mr. Obama fails to win the White House, it is unlikely that organized labor would be able to pass its aggressive legislative agenda, especially its No. 1 priority - the bitterly contested "card-check" issue, which would allow employees to form a union as soon as a majority sign cards declaring their support. After easily passing the House last year largely along party lines, the bill came nine votes short of the 60-vote threshold needed to stop a filibuster. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania was the lone Republican to vote for cloture.

In a telephone interview last week from Denver, where he was attending the Democratic convention, Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO's director of government affairs, said he was "optimistic about a pro-labor president taking office." He predicted that Democrats "will be close enough to 60 senators to begin to eliminate the filibuster logjam," which would help labor achieve its goals, including "card-check," universal health care, paid sick leave and pension security.

The "card-check" process is "repeatedly subjected to coercion" and would "take away the right to a secret-ballot election in the workplace," said Randel Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits.

"I've been around 20 years," Mr. Johnson said, "and I've never seen such a radical agenda on Capitol Hill" as Big Labor's.

Mr. Semmens of the National Right to Work Committee said the November elections could result in "an unprecedented union power grab in terms of electing a president and Congress that are going to hand over power to union bosses."

If organized labor achieves its political goals and then its chief legislative goal - "card check" - chances are good that an expanding American union movement will be gathering for future Labor Day celebrations.

LOAD-DATE: September 1, 2008