Private Sector Employees Increasingly Rejecting Union Orgnizing

Private Sector Employees Increasingly Rejecting Union Orgnizing

It seems like the people most interested in unions these days are grad students and coffee shop workers.

Mark Pulliam writes at Law & Liberty:

The Continuing Decline of the Private-Sector Union

Union representation in the private sector, which has been determined by employee choice in secret ballot elections conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) since 1935, has fallen precipitously in recent decades. This is due in part to the decline of traditional union strongholds—manufacturing and heavy industry—in union-friendly states such as Michigan and Ohio, the large-scale siting of auto plants (and other manufacturing facilities) in southern states with right-to-work laws, and the growing obsolescence of the New Deal’s collective-bargaining model in an era of an educated, largely mobile, white-collar workforce that enjoys significant protections by state and federal laws—without having to pay union dues.

As private-sector employees increasingly reject union organizing campaigns, and as unions continue to lose representation elections, the anti-employer NLRB has found new ways to force unions on unwilling employees and impose bargaining obligations on employers without the benefit of an election, contrary to the National Labor Relations Act. Recent events involving the United Auto Workers union illustrate these trends. Organizing workers in southern states will be a challenge, even with the tag team-style assistance of the NLRB.

For a variety of reasons, the portion of the private-sector workforce represented by a union has dramatically declined from a peak of around 35 percent in 1954 to a mere six percent in 2023—the lowest percentage since the NLRA was passed. The union membership rate of government employees, in contrast, is more than five times greater, at 32.5 percent. The NLRA, intended to remedy the supposed imbalance of “bargaining power” between capital and labor, doesn’t even cover government workers, who (in theory at least) serve the public.

Despite union rhetoric espousing “industrial democracy,” the irony is that public school teachers and government bureaucrats are far more likely to be unionized than factory workers and other blue-collar occupations. In terms of members, the UAW, once an industrial powerhouse, is dwarfed by the National Education Association and other public-sector unions, such as AFSCME and SEIU. The decline of the US auto industry parallels the shrinkage of Detroit’s population from 1.8 million residents in 1950 to about 630,000 today. The ebbing fortunes of the corruption-plagued UAW mirror those of the domestic auto industry—and the Motor City itself. Over the past decade, more than a dozen UAW officials were convicted of crimes, including two past presidents.

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