326,000 Fewer in '06
Unionized Workers A Vanishing Breed

By GINGER ADAMS OTIS

The number of workers in the U.S. who belong to a union dropped to an all-time low in 2006, according to a report released Jan. 25 by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Labor movement's demon.

Two years ago, unionized wage and salary workers comprised 12.5 percent of the national work force. In 2006, the number fell to 12 percent - a drop of 326,000 workers - leaving about 15.4 million people in unions.

Alarming Trend

That's a sharp decrease from 1983 - the first year such figures were kept - when 20 percent of U.S. workers were part of a labor movement. In the mid-1950s, an estimated 35 percent of the work force was unionized.

Ed Ott, executive director of the AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council, partially faulted President Bush for the precipitous decline, blasting his administration for eviscerating the working class.

"This report makes it absolutely clear that this President spent more time exporting jobs than any other President has in my lifetime," the labor leader declared. "There was a conscious effort to send jobs out of this country for cheap labor, and this President led the charge."

NEW CONGRESS BRINGS HOPE: Ed Ott, the executive director of the AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council, hopes that the shift of Congress into the hands of the Democrats will give employees and unions a fairer hearing than they have received from Republicans since President Bush took office. He asserted that the National Labor Relations Board under Mr. Bush has failed 'to effectively protect workers' from intimidation and adverse job actions when they tried to unionize.

Steve Smith, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, agreed that the report was "another troubling sign that all middle-class America was struggling." But he foresaw an upswing in the future.

Regaining Their Voice

"I think we are seeing a lot of confidence around the country now. There are organizing campaigns going on," he said. "Look at the results of the November elections - not just in terms of a more worker-friendly Congress but what workers did to get people elected who would hear their concerns when they speak out, which the former Republican-led Congress did not."

The 2006 data compiled by the DOL revealed certain economic, racial and gender patterns among union members. Workers in the public sector were five times as likely to be in a union as those in private industries, the report said.

Education, police, firefighting, and library occupations had the highest unionization rates among all occupations, at 37 percent. Men were still more likely to be union members than women, and blacks were more likely to be union members than white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.

NLRB Reshaped by Bush

Mr. Ott said Mr. Bush's negative influence could also be seen in actions by the National Labor Relations Board, which since 2000 has made a series of controversial rulings that critics charge have undercut workers' right to organize.

The NLRB is comprised of five Bush appointees - three Republicans and two Democrats. The board has permitted no oral arguments on any cases since Mr. Bush took office. There had been up to 10 a year in previous administrations.

A recent survey by an independent Washington think tank found that one in six workers who tried to organize a union at the workplace got wrongfully terminated; a similar poll conducted by the AFL-CIO put the number at one in five.

According to the AFL-CIO, the NLRB in 2005 had to reinstate 32,000 workers with back pay after they were fired for attempting to join unions. That was only the figure for cases that were settled; the actual number of workers appealing wrongful terminations was much higher, the AFL-CIO said.

NLRB Cites Worker Aid

A DOL spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the NLRB referred this paper to a Jan. 3 summary of 2006 accomplishments compiled by NLRB General Counsel Ronald Meisburg.

The report listed an array of achievements, but made special note of the board's 96.7-percent settlement rate in meritorious unfair labor practice cases. A total of $110,727,428 was recovered on behalf of employees as back pay or reimbursement of fees, dues, and fines, with 2,927 employees offered reinstatement, Mr. Meisburg wrote.

The results failed to impress Mr. Ott.

Wants Congress to Probe

"Congress should convene hearings immediately to investigate the NLRB's failure to effectively protect workers," he contended. "For a long time, in poll after poll, more than 65 percent of Americans asked if they'd like to have union membership said yes. But the second question is, are you willing to get fired to get it? As long as employers can fire with impunity, workers have difficulty organizing - loss of employment is capital punishment for workers."

In an effort to address the problem, the AFL-CIO has crafted the Employee Free Choice Act.

The legislation would allow workers to form unions by signing a card or petition, impose stronger penalties on employers who violate labor laws, and permit arbitration to settle contract disputes.

The labor organization has urged the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass the measure, although some labor organizers said they doubted President Bush would sign it into law.

Easier to Join

Supporters of the measure say it will be fairer to workers, making it easier to join a union and removing employers' abilities to mount anti-union campaigns at the work place. Anti-union opponents argue that it strips workers of the right to vote privately on individual union preferences and could result in union intimidation of workers.

The DOL Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that approximately 1.5 million wage and salary workers were represented by a union on their main job in 2006, while not being union members themselves. Slightly more than half of these workers were employed in government.

Full-time wage and salary workers who were union members had median weekly earnings of $833, compared with a median of $642 for their non-union counterparts. The report attributed the difference to several factors, including coverage by a collective bargaining agreement.

Strong in Northeast

The Northeast remains a labor stronghold, comparatively speaking, while the South has membership rates far below the national average. The five states reporting union membership rates below 5 percent last year were North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Texas.

Four states had union membership rates higher than 20 percent in 2006: Hawaii (24.7 percent), New York (24.4 percent), Alaska (22.2 percent), and New Jersey (20.1 percent). Hawaii and New York have recorded the highest union membership rates among all states for 10 of the past 11 years.

Despite New York's relatively high "union density," as Mr. Ott described it, it isn't exempt from some of the worker-related issues cropping up elsewhere across the country.

Elected officials in California and New York - the states with the two highest percentages of unionized residents - in recent years have suggested that current public-employee health-care and pension benefits can't be sustained indefinitely.

Terminator Backed Off

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first term made the most aggressive attempt to scale back long-standing civil service benefits, announcing the end of death and disability payments for cops and firefighters, and a sweeping overhaul of pensions from guaranteed benefits to a 401k-based plan.

He eventually was forced to retreat after facing intense pressure from firefighters, nurses, Teachers, cops and other public employees, who followed him around the country holding protests wherever he went.

Mayor Bloomberg Jan. 25 said he still believed there should be a new pension tier offering lesser benefits for future city workers. A week earlier, in his State of the City Address, he said he would put forward state legislation to help control a threat to the city's long-term fiscal health: "unchecked growth of pensions."

Tells Albany to Butt Out

After accusing the State Legislature of "giving away the store, getting no productivity in return and saddling our children with costly pension giveaways," Mr. Bloomberg chided Albany for "playing Santa Claus with the city's money."

Pension issues should no longer be routed through the legislature, he said, but decided by the city "on the collective bargaining table."

Mr. Ott said that elected officials like to ignore that U.S. pensions are a pittance compared to those in the rest of the industrialized nations, where workers on average collect 70 to 80 percent of their wages upon retirement, while American workers typically get between 30 and 50 percent.

"Overall, pension costs are not that significant [in the U.S.]. And employers tend to forget one important thing: pensions are not their money," he asserted. "Pensions are the deferred wages of workers who make a conscious decision to take a portion of their earnings and put it toward retirement. It's the workers' money, not theirs."