The past 30 years have been dismal ones for the labor movement. In the American private sector trade-union density has fallen from a 33% in 1979 to just 7% today. In Britain it has dropped from 44% to 15%.This isn’t just a major market anomaly - less than 20% of workers in the developing countries belong to unions.
There is one big exception to this story of decline, however: the public sector. In the Canadian public sector union density has increased from 12% in 1960 to more than 70% today. In America it has increased over the same period from 11% to 36%. There are now more American workers in unions in the public sector (7.6m) than in the private sector (7.1m), although the private sector employs five times as many people. Union density is now higher in the public sector than it was in the private sector in its glory days, in the 1950s.
This private-public shift has transformed the trade union movement. In the 1950s unions were solidly working class organizations, dominated by men who had left school at 16 and leant left on economics but right on social issues because they knew right from wrong – but they also knew where their bread was buttered.
Today union members are much more middle-class: more than a quarter of American unionists have college degrees, and even more have liberal views on economic, social and environmental issues.
The shift has also created tension between the public and private sectors. The private sector is dominated by competition and turbulence. Performance-related pay is the norm, and redundancies (and the resultant lay-offs) are commonplace.
The public sector, by contrast, is a haven of security and stability. Many people have jobs for life and performance measures are rare. The result is an economic paradox: the typical public worker is better off than the people he or she is supposed to serve, and the gap has widened significantly over the past decade. In America, pay and benefits have grown twice as fast in the public sector as they have in the private sector.
Now that the sovereign-debt crisis is forcing governments to put their houses in order, the growing discrepancy between conditions in the public and private sectors has eroded much of the sympathy public-sector workers might once have enjoyed.
The times – they are a changin’.
The Unions are gunning for your VOTE or your ASS!
Public-sector unions are some of the world’s most powerful interest groups. Many of them have large memberships and comparably large wallets: the American National Education Association, the main teachers’ union, has 3.2 MILLION members, an annual budget of over $300 MILLION and a vibrant tradition of political activism. But don’t they work for the betterment of the kids? Not really.
As Albert Shanker, President of the United Federations of teachers put it “I’ll start representing the interests of children when school children start paying union dues.”
Comforting.
But their influence goes much deeper. In many countries unions prop up the left. In America Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, was the most frequent guest at the White House in the first six months of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Public-sector unions enjoy advantages that their private-sector rivals only dream of. As providers of vital monopoly services, they can and do, close down entire cities. And as powerful political machines, they pick the people who sit on the other side of the bargaining table. Daniel DiSalvo, the author of an excellent essay on America’s public-sector unions in Nation Affairs magazine, points out that the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was the biggest contributor to political campaigns in 1989-2004.
He also notes that such influence is more decisive in local campaigns, where turnout is low, than in national ones. Even if they fail to elect “their” candidates, public-sector unions have a relatively easy time negotiating with politicians.
Private-sector bosses are accustomed to playing hardball with unions because they know they will go bankrupt if they don’t.Politicians have no such discipline: they can always raise taxes or borrow from future generations. Those who have challenged the unions have often regretted it. Even the Terminator got terminated by the powerful unions. California’s former governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, tried to fight the unions in the court of public opinion, only to be outgunned. Others have attempted a more stopgap approach, only to get the blame when services are disrupted.
Paulina Gretky - not union thug
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