Unions gain optimism on political front

For the first time in a quarter century, union workers this year will have good reason to celebrate Labor Day.

After decades of declining rolls, union membership increased last year as a percentage of the total work force. But organized labor’s near-term future looks worrisome as the U.S. economic slowdown threatens to evolve into an outright recession, accelerating the loss of manufacturing jobs that have been a union bulwark for decades.

This year, Labor Day falls between the Democratic and Republican national conventions. That juxtaposition raises some crucial questions: Will the labor movement be able to build upon the political success it achieved in the 2006 congressional elections by expanding the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in November? And will labor help elect a Democrat who likely would be the most pro-labor advocate in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt?

If organized labor achieves those goals, then its long-term future would look much rosier than its recent past.

Last year’s 311,000 increase in union membership represented the largest annual jump since 1983, the U.S. Department of Labor reported. As a result, the nation’s 15.7 million union workers increased their share of the labor force for the first time since 1983, when employees represented by organized labor accounted for more than 20 percent of the work force.

In 2007, after decades of decline, labor’s share of workers edged up to 12.1 percent from 12 percent a year earlier. Last year, 7.5 percent of private-sector workers were union members, down from the 35 percent level that prevailed during the 1950s. Nearly 36 percent of public-sector workers were union members in 2007, up from 10 percent in the early 1960s.

“Last year’s increase was not a temporary spike,” said Chris Chafe, executive director of Change to Win, the 6.2-million-member labor federation that was created in 2005 after several of the nation’s largest unions broke away from the AFL-CIO. “Manufacturing workers have lost millions of jobs under [President] Bush, and many other sectors believe they have been in a recession for more than a year,” he said.

What happened last year was “the beginning of an upward trend, a watershed moment” in the American labor movement, Mr. Chafe said.

Richard Hurd, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., noted that unions increased their share of health care workers from 12.5 percent to 13.5 percent last year. Countering that advance, however, were layoffs at the Big Three automakers, he said, which have been shedding jobs for years and likely will continue to do so.

“Overall,” Mr. Hurd said, “labor is pretty stable now, but we are moving into a recession, which will be difficult for unions.”

Economists have been debating all year whether the U.S. economy will enter a recession or whether one began earlier this year. What is indisputable is that the economy shed nearly 500,000 jobs, including more than 270,000 in manufacturing, during the first seven months of this year.

Many of the manufacturing jobs lost were union jobs.

Over the past several decades, as the U.S. economy has become increasingly service-oriented, manufacturing’s share of the economy has declined. That has significantly contributed to the declining share of union jobs in the work force.

The decline in union membership has had severe economic consequences not just for organized labor, but for most rank-and-file workers, said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute. “With only 7.5 percent of the private-sector work force unionized today, it is very tough for unions to set wages in any of the industries,” he said.

Mr. Bernstein recently examined the productivity and compensation trends of the past 60 years, when union membership in the private sector declined from roughly 35 percent to 7.5 percent. Between 1947 and 1979, when productivity increased an average of 2.5 percent per year, compensation (wages and benefits) for rank-and-file workers rose 2.4 percent per year after inflation. Between 1979 and 2007, when annual productivity averaged 1.9 percent, compensation increased 0.2 percent per year as hourly wages declined and benefits increased.

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