It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined from 2023 to 2024, going from 10% to 9.9% of wage and salary workers. Some 32% of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9% of private sector workers, down from 6.0% in 2023.
This means 49% of all union members work for the government and, even more striking, 32% belong to the two national teachers unions. As National Review‘s Dominic Pino pointed out, national media is chock full of hopeful stories about union organizing drives and strikes — he cited 214 in 2014 — but the longtime trend line away from private sector unions has not turned around despite the considerable efforts of Democratic politicians.
This is despite a certain amount of nostalgia in liberal and conservative quarters for the days when union representation of private sector employees was considered the norm. Union membership as a percentage of employees peaked at 33.5% in 1954, when almost no public employees belonged to unions.
That’s more than five times the percentage of private sector union membership today. It’s even more striking because few union members lived in the South, so the union share in the North was up to 40%.
What accounts for this major change in American life? It starts with how unions were formed. Craft and building unions have roots going back more than a century when many served the function of medieval guilds — maintaining quality standards and stamping out the competition. They often had a discernible ethnic character, with membership open to sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins of current members.
The big jump — a tripling — in union membership came suddenly from 1937 to 1947 after the passage of the New Deal’s Wagner Act. Industrial workers weren’t the worst-off employees in the 1930s depression. They feared that “time and motion study” managers would speed up the assembly lines, and, with 20% unemployment, they knew they could be easily replaced if they walked out.
In early 1937, auto and steel union organizers staged illegal sit-ins in the giant factories that fueled American economic growth from the 1890s to the 1920s. After Democratic governors refused to enforce court orders to clear out, auto and steel executives caved in and accepted the industrial unions as bargaining agents.
When the big factories switched to wartime production, industrial labor leaders, such as the young Walter Reuther, cooperated to prevent strikes as workers churned out astonishing numbers of planes in Henry Ford’s Willow Run plant in Michigan and boats in Henry J. Kaiser’s Richmond shipyard in California.
In the postwar years, Reuther negotiated with General Motors’s Charles E. Wilson on the 1950 Treaty of Detroit — a five-year no-strike contract with cost-of-living increases, healthcare benefits, and defined-benefit pensions.
In what has been referred to as “America’s Midcentury Moment,” it became widely known that the only enlightened way to manage enormous centralized factory operations, vulnerable always to violence, was to cooperate with union leaders. Their increasingly choreographed negotiations dominated national news (I still remember the names of the United Steelworkers and the chief steel management negotiator in the 1959 steel strike sessions) and set the pattern for wage and benefit packages in smaller companies.
Alas, as so often happens in human affairs, success bred failure. U.S. auto and steel companies failed to respond effectively to unexpected foreign competition, and 1970s contracts promising early retirement and open-ended pre-Medicare retiree healthcare insurance pushed Detroit’s Big Three and Big Steel toward bankruptcy.
Foreign-based auto companies building new plants avoided Michigan and Ohio counties with elected judges who would not enjoin wildcat strikes and chose sites in states with right-to-work laws banning compulsory union membership. New manufacturing techniques promoting cooperation and worker autonomy produced better quality products than the Wagner Act unionism’s adversarial foreman-versus-shop-steward bargaining and thousands of pages of work rules.
As inventive employers moved from labor-intensive to increasingly automated manufacturing and as a growing economy moved from manufacturing to services, rapid-growth firms such as Walmart and Amazon depended on thousands of geographically dispersed locations rather than a few enormous factories, while high-tech assembly work migrated to China.
Unions were also victims of their own good intentions. Federal and state minimum wage, work safety, and pension legislation made union protections seem unnecessary. HR departments, created in response to government regulations and court decisions, handled matters unions used to.
There has also been a decline in the quality of union leadership. Reuther and his immediate successors were men of broad outlook and high integrity. In contrast, two recent United Auto Workers presidents were convicted of embezzlement, and the current UAW leader, Shawn Fain, endorsed President Donald Trump’s April 2 tariffs and then expressed embarrassment after automaker Stellantis laid off workers because of them.
Similarly, the Washington Examiner‘s Salena Zito said National Steelworkers leaders who supported Cleveland-Cliffs’s acquisition of U.S. Steel are finding themselves out of step with local union leaders who favored Nippon Steel’s acquisition, which promised to keep its Monongahela Valley plant open. It’s unclear whether today’s union leaders understand their members’ short-term interests.
Or consider the record of the two teachers unions, which today pocket the dues of one-third of American union members. Their major achievement in the past decade was shutting down schools in states and cities controlled by their Democratic allies, not just for six weeks to stop the spread of COVID-19, but for two years or more after it was clear that schoolchildren didn’t contract or transmit the virus at significant rates.
The result has been a sharp lowering of test scores, especially among black and disadvantaged students. It may have been the greatest destruction of learning in U.S. history.
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In contrast, the greatest improvement in NAEP test scores in recent years came in the two non-teacher union-dominated states, Mississippi and Louisiana, which have the nation’s highest black percentages. Their scores have jumped from the bottom to the middle rank of states and, adjusted for racial composition, now rank highest in the nation, ahead of even high-income suburb-dominated Massachusetts.
Democrats inevitably insert provisions encouraging private-sector unionization in their big legislation, including Obamacare and the Biden stimulus. Provisions that abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson pointed out include increased costs and delayed completion of public works. But these haven’t pushed the union numbers up. It seems that however well-suited labor unions were during the “Midcentury Moment,” they’re not well-suited to our current service-dominated decentralized economy.