Why America Needs More Unions

[ytowner]

Need more unions! HAHA. They are dwindling in membership across the United States for a reason.

[Dan Moadus]

The truth about the diminishment  of union representation in America is one of diminishing returns. The American worker's right to form and join a union is untouched. Even though people like Dennis think people are stupid; they are smart enough to decide that the disadvantage of union membership out weighs the advantages, or unionism would be growing rather than shrinking. They have seen too many people led down the garden path by union leadership, such as the PATCO union which thought they had the stronger hand. The public employee is blinded to the dismal history of latter day unionism in our country.

[irishbobcat]

You'd think from the sudden intensity of this battle that organized labor was a major force in the American economy, but nothing could be further from the truth. In 1945, about 36% of non-agricultural U.S. workers were represented by a union. As of 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 7% of privately employed workers were unionized and about 36% of public employees. Overall, a mere 12.4% of all American workers belonged to a union in 2010.

Moreover, even though the unionization of public employees has masked organized labor's long decline, 4 out of 10 public employees in America already are legally prohibited from collective bargaining. Anti-labor legislation has been instrumental in the decline of private-sector unions since passage of the Taft-Hartley Act following World War II. Many economists would point to that long decline as a major cause of the continuing erosion of middle-class wages and salaries and the insecurity engendered by employers' abandonment of conventional pensions and their now-routine recourse to layoffs as a way to shore up balance sheets.

For more than a century, democracies with modern economies have recognized the rights of workers to organize and to bargain collectively for wages, working conditions and benefits. Those rights are fundamental to a decent society. The temporary problem with some public employee pension schemes ought not to be used to strip working men and women of that basic protection.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com