Labor Spotlight
The big picture on unions
Jun 9, 2005 3:24 PM
More government workers than private-sector workers belong to unions, but private-sector employees in fact have more rights under the law.
About 36 percent of government workers nationwide were union members in 2004, compared with 8 percent of workers in private-sector industries. But while the 1935 National Labor Relations Act gives all private-sector workers the right to join unions and the right to strike, public employees must rely on the good graces of state lawmakers.
Just over a third of the approximately 20 million federal, state and local workers in the United States do not have the right to belong to a union. Public employees in 15 states have no collective-bargaining rights while another 12 states allow only specific groups of workers to join unions.
The right to strike is even more limited. State and local employees in only nine states have that right. All federal employees are barred from striking.
Public employees have recently suffered several serious setbacks. After 9/11, President Bush nullified the union rights of 186,000 workers in the new Department of Homeland Security. Newly elected Republican governors in Missouri and Indiana repealed collective-bargaining rights — and ripped up contracts — for their states’ workers this January. The Governor of Kentucky did the same in 2003.
Public school employees are better off than most. More than 80 percent of the nation’s more than 4 million teachers are union members.
