Labor Spotlight
Movement in decline ...
Oct 5, 2006 2:39 PM
... and why it matters to UFT members
Labor unions are becoming a rare breed in this country — the result of shifts in the U.S. economy, a right-wing assault on workers’ rights, and our own failure to organize new members.
Things may look peachy in the public sector, where the percentage of unionized workers has climbed to 30 percent. But the labor movement is fighting for its life in the private sector, where, after three decades of continual decline, only 7.9 percent of workers are unionized.
In all, only 12.5 percent of working Americans belong to unions today. That’s down from 18.8 percent in 1984 and a high of 35 percent in 1954.
In effect, the right to organize and collectively bargain is not available to most workers. The average worker has no protection from an arbitrary boss. Corporate America no longer recognizes the labor movement’s right to exist.
We are sheltered from this reality in New York City to some degree. New York State has the highest union density of any state, with 25 percent of workers in unions, but the number of unionized workers is falling here as well.
Why should it matter to UFT members if so few workers in the private sector belong to unions?
Because, like it or not, labor standards in the private sector set the pace for the rest of the work force. If low-wage, low-benefit jobs become the norm in the private sector, it will be impossible to sustain a vital public-sector union movement.
In the 1960s, when unions first took root in the public sector, their goal was to try to match the higher wages and better benefits of workers in the unionized manufacturing sector. Now the private sector is exerting a downward pull on wages and benefits as jobs shift from manufacturing to the largely non-union service sector.
Labor’s decline means trouble for workers
As labor unions have decreased in size and influence, American workers lost tremendous ground:
- 90 percent of Americans have lost real income since 1973
- 47 million — 16 percent of the population — have no health insurance
- 50 percent have no retirement security
- The top 1 percent of the population owns 75 percent of the wealth
- No developed nation has a wider gap between rich and poor
Even big, highly profitable employers now offer minimal employee benefits. The percentage of Americans with job-based health insurance has steadily declined from 63.6 in 2000 to 59.5 percent in 2005, even as health-insurance premiums rose at double-digit annual rates. Even profitable companies whose pension plans are in good financial shape — DuPont, Verizon and IBM to name a few — are slashing pension benefits.
The UFT and other public-employee unions are going to find it harder and harder to win public sympathy in their contract battles if their wages and benefits are better than those of most workers in private employ.
The labor movement’s decline has had a serious impact on community standards and public policy as well. In states where few workers are unionized, more people live in poverty, households earn less money, and more people have no health insurance. In these weak union states, governments spend less on education, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation.
Why the link? Because in places where unions are strong, working people have a political voice.
The ongoing decline in union membership is making it tougher for the labor movement to execute a successful political program. Even when most union households vote for the worker-friendly candidate, their votes can’t swing elections simply because not enough people belong to union households. Consider the results of the 2005 presidential election, when labor had its best get-out-the-vote effort in a generation. John Kerry beat George Bush among union members by 32 percent, but he lost overall by 3 percent.
The current rate of organizing in this country is not even remotely close enough to reverse the decline in union membership. To catch up to where we were in 1981 at the time of Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the air traffic controllers’ strike, we would need to organize 10.7 million workers.
Public workers the target
Given that unions are now strongest in the public sector, it’s no coincidence that public employees have a target on their backs.
Unionized firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers responded admirably on 9/11. Yet on the insulting grounds that we can’t entrust national security to unionized employees, President George Bush turned around and tried to abolish the collective-bargaining rights of 170,000 federal workers in the new Department of Homeland Security, denied collective-bargaining rights to 60,000 new federal airport screeners, and is trying to gut the collective-bargaining and civil-service rights of 750,000 workers at the Department of Defense.
The attack on public-sector unions extends to the state level. Since 2003, Republican governors in Kentucky, Indiana and Missouri have revoked the union rights — and ripped up the contracts — of their states’ workers with the stroke of a pen.
Teachers’ unions are a particularly choice target of anti-union forces since more than 80 percent of the nation’s more than 4 million teachers belongs to unions, making teaching the most highly unionized sector of the work force. The Bush administration seized upon Hurricane Katrina to reopen most of New Orleans public schools as non-unionized charter schools. And the Detroit teachers union made $63 million in concessions in September in the settlement that ended their 16-day strike.
Many so-called education reformers — including our very own chancellor — try to scapegoat unions for the public schools’ shortcomings. On the contrary, a recent Harvard study shows that the presence of teacher unions is linked to stronger student performance on SATs and ACTs. A much older Rand study showed that unionized teachers are more open to reform experiments, probably because they felt more protected.
What can we do to change the climate?
- Unions can engage vigorously in politics and public outreach and build broad alliances. The November elections are very important because control of the Congress is at stake. Unions need to craft alliances because they aren’t going to win many battles these days going it alone. The UFT’s most important ally is parents.
- Coordinate our efforts with other unions. For the UFT, that has meant joining a bargaining coalition of 17 municipal unions. We are stronger when we are united — particularly against an administration that uses pattern bargaining (the first settlement binds others) and has the opportunity as well to play one union off against another.
- Organize the unorganized. The UFT is doing just that with our campaign to win union rights for more than 30,000 low-wage and mostly minority home day-care workers in New York City.
- Organize the organized. That’s where school chapter leaders are essential. Their job is much broader than enforcing the contract. Chapter leaders are the chief organizers in their buildings. The union counts on them to get staff in their schools to sign membership cards and sign COPE cards. It counts on them to reach out to new educators and in general galvanize members in their schools. The strength of the UFT, at the end of the day, rests on the strength of its individual chapters.
It’s “do or die” for this country’s labor movement and for us at the UFT. We either make history, or we are history.
This column is adapted from a presentation by Cornell trainer Jeff Grabelsky at a UFT staff retreat at Cornell University in Ithaca in August. UFT President Randi Weingarten gave her own version at the UFT’s chapter leader training on Sept. 16.
