Economix Blog: Labor Sees Bright Spots in Membership Trends

The American labor movement received some bitter news last week when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership – it showed a 398,000 overall decline in union membership, with the percentage of workers in unions dropping to 11.3 percent, the lowest rate in nearly a century.

But some union leaders saw some important silver linings in the gloomy report — especially the surprisingly strong growth in labor’s ranks in California. The bureau reported a jump of 110,000 in the number of union members in California, to 2.49 million (meaning that in the 49 other states, the overall loss was 508,000 members).

“There is a significant organizing consciousness among unions in California that I haven’t seen in other parts of the country,” said Kent Wong, director of the Labor Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And a major factor in California’s success is there has been a very aggressive attempt on the part of many unions to organizing immigrant workers.”

The jump in union membership in California is tied to the one other bright spot for unions in the bureau’s report. While union membership among whites fell by 547,000 last year (to 11.3 million), union membership among Latinos jumped by 156,000 last year (to 1.98 million) while increasing for Asian-Americans by 45,000 (to 668,000) — although the percentage of Asian-American workers in unions actually dropped, to 9.6 percent, as the overall number of Asian-Americans employed jumped sharply.

In California, there are vigorous campaigns to unionize car-wash workers, recycling workers and the truck drivers who transport freight to and from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. And in recent years, labor unions have organized about 200,000 home care aides in California.

Immigrants account for a high percentage of workers in those groups.

“The Latino population is growing in California,” said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, the federation of the state’s unions. “Latinos and other immigrants are more prone to join unions. A lot of Latinos developed a historic sense of economic and social justice in their home countries.”

Mr. Pulaski said a big reason that unions in California are doing better than those in other states is that California’s unions have built impressive political power, helping the Democrats clinch a two-thirds supermajority in both houses of the state legislature. Thanks to their political power, California unions have, for instance, persuaded lawmakers in much of the state to make it easy for unions to organize the 200,000 home care aides.

And Mr. Pulaski said the organizing victories and progressive politics in California create a hospitable hothouse atmosphere for organizing, encouraging other workers to unionize.

Professor Wong said, “The unionization victories at four car washes in Los Angeles have gotten a lot of attention among Latinos. They have really resonated.”

(Union membership did rise in a handful of other states, but more modestly than in California. Those states included Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas.)

All this is far different from what has happened in the Midwest over the last two years. Republicans in Wisconsin enacted a far-reaching law that curbed the collective bargaining rights of most of the government employees in that state – making many government workers conclude that there was little reason to remain in their union. Ohio Republicans enacted a similar law in 2011, but Ohioans repealed that anti-union law in a referendum in November of that year.

Indiana’s Republican-dominated legislature enacted a “right to work” law last February that is likely to reduce union membership, and in Michigan, the Republican-dominated legislature and the Republican governor also enacted a “right to work” law last month. “Right to work” laws bar any requirement that workers at a unionized workplace pay any dues or fees to the union. Such laws often encourage workers to quit their unions, because by quitting they no longer have to pay union dues or fees.

Barry T. Hirsch, a labor economist at Georgia State University, said the anti-labor offensive in the Midwest had taken a heavy toll on union membership there. In just five Midwestern states — Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin – union membership fell by 252,000 last year, according to the bureau’s report.

Professor Hirsch suggested that the reported drop-off in union members in the Midwest might be exaggerated because when questioners doing the household survey that was crucial to last week’s report went to workers‘ homes to interview them, some union members might have grown reluctant to acknowledge to the questioners that they belonged to a union because unions had taken such a public relations beating from government officials.

But Professor Wong of U.C.L.A. said he doubted that any union members questioned in the household survey would be too scared to acknowledge belonging to a union.

Mr. Pulaski, head of the California Labor Federation, foresees more unionization gains in California this year – including among port truck drivers and car washes and from the continued efforts by two of the nation’s most aggressive organizing unions, the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association.

“I think we’re on the cutting edge of what unions are doing in the United States,” Mr. Pulaski said. In other words, he says, California unions have put together a silver linings playbook that unions in other states can learn from.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/labor-sees-bright-spots-in-membership-trends/?partner=rss&emc=rss