Why the labor union movement lost steam in SCC

Despite high nationwide pandemic-era membership, labor unions are losing workers big time. Why haven’t unions remained the powerhouses of Santa Clara County’s employed workforce? Multiple sources below untangle Labor’s fall from grace for the local citizen. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

Union participation across the United States has tremendously declined since the mid-20th century. Nelson Lichtenstein reports on Dissent Magazine:

Even if official labor has shifted to the left, it is nevertheless a shadow of its former self. The steady decline in union density and social power, from about one-third of the non-farm workforce in the early 1950s to a little more than 10 percent today, is a trend of great significance. Private-sector union density is now below 7 percent, a figure not seen since the late nineteenth century when unionism had only a semi-legal status, police and courts routinely broke strikes, and politicians and the daily press demonized labor leaders.

Read the whole thing here.

While California’s union enrollment numbers are higher than the U.S. average, they continue to plummet year after year, as relayed by Grace Gedye et al. on CalMatters:

The birthplace of many national labor movements, California hit its unionization peak in the 1950s, with more than 40% of the workforce unionized. The state has been a trailblazer, carving new paths for collective bargaining. Notably, labor organizing led by legendary activist Cesar Chavez brought wins such as the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, establishing the right of farmworkers to form and join unions, a first in the nation…

The share of California's workforce that is unionized has fallen in recent decades. But membership rates track above the national average.

Like union membership across the country, the reach of California’s unions has been declining, reaching a historical low of 14.7% in 2018.

Read the whole thing here.

In the South Bay Area (SJ, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara), 92,997 residents are currently unionized as of 2021—just 9.6% of employed workers. Barry Hirsch and David Macpherson lay out the data on Unionstats.com:

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA

Sector	Obs	Employment	Members	Covered	%Mem	%Cov
Total	695	966,571	92,997	104,689	9.6	10.8
Private	629	878,882	43,354	52,452	4.9	6.0
Public	66	87,688	49,642	52,237	56.6	59.6

Read the whole thing here.

John R. Lott at Fox News echoes this thought:

Unions are harmful because they act as monopolies. If the union members won’t work, the law makes it extremely difficult for anyone else to step in and do their jobs. As a result, union workers have little competition -- so they can demand higher wages and do less work.

By threatening to stop work if companies don’t pay employees more, unions force companies to layoff some workers. That hurts some union workers. Unions don't just pit workers against employers. They pit a select group of workers against consumers, stockholders, and other workers. Unions don't even make agreements that are in the interest of all their own workers, just those in the majority, usually just older workers with more seniority.

Suppose demands for higher wages or benefits means 20 percent of unionized workers would be fired. That isn't such a hard decision for a union. Twenty percent of its members will oppose the agreement, but they won't be union members for long…

Read the whole thing here.

Adding on to these analyses, Edward Ring of the California Policy Center reports several dangerous consequences of the modern labor movement, especially for workers who aren’t progressive extremists:

The negative consequences of government union control over the vast majority of California’s local and state elected officials cannot be overstated. Major corporations and wealthy individuals, by and large, have acquiesced to the government union agenda, greatly narrowing the scope of political debate and limiting the options offered voters.

One predictable and very serious result of government union influence in California’s politics is out-of-control rates of pay and benefits for public employees. For example, the average public sector retiree in California now collects a pension of $70,000 per year for 30 years of fulltime work. The pension systems that collect and invest money to fund these generous pensions are all facing bankruptcy, and demanding tens of billions of additional payments from taxpayers to stay solvent.

Another major negative consequence of unionized government in California is their almost universal partisan bias towards progressive policies. This finds expression in the curricular agenda pushed into the public schools by the teachers’ union. This union relentlessly lobbies for classroom material that prioritizes progressive topics such as ethnic studies and gender studies, along with coursework that disparages American history, the American founding, and free market principles.

Read the whole thing here.

Are unions even useful at the end of the day? An anonymous Atlantic reader weighs in on our (lack of) necessity for Labor:

You negotiate with your feet.  If you are treated worse than market value, you go somewhere else.  In times like now when everyone's market value is less, and there are fewer options, you take what you get and you like it.  When times get better, that is when you get your due.

Companies that don't pay their people what they are worth go out of business.  Companies that pay their people more than they are worth go out of business even faster.

Read the whole thing here.

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Image by Mat McDermott