UNIONIZATION

Decline in unionization



Decline in unionization

Introduction

The American labor movement did not fare well during the last quarter of the 20th century. Not only did the share of workers who were union members fall from 25 percent in 1977 to 14 percent by 1997 (a decline of 44 percent), but the total number of union members also decreased by nearly 4 million between these years despite an overall increase in the number of jobs by more than 37 million.1 The extent of deunionization in the manufacturing sector was particularly dramatic, with the proportion of unionized workers falling from 38 percent in 1977 to 18 percent in 1997 (a decline of 53 percent).

The only bright spot was in the public sector, where the proportion of unionized workers increased. Various explanations have been set forth to account for this deunionization trend in the private sector. In an article in a symposium on public and private unionization, Melvin Reder (1988) lists the following as the main causal factors cited by various researchers: (1) increased interarea competition, both domestic and international; (2) more rapid growth in certain categories of the labor force (e.g., women, southerners, white- collar workers) that are less favorable to unionization than others; (3) deregulation of transportation industries; (4) declining efforts of unions to recruit new members; (5) government activity that substitutes for union services (e.g., unemployment insurance and industrial accident insurance); (6) a decline in prounion attitudes among workers; and (7) increased employer resistance to unionization efforts. In another contribution to this symposium, Richard Freeman (1988) also lists antiunion government policies—such as the actions of Ronald Reagan's administration in destroying the union representing US air controllers in response to their strike in 1981—as among the possible causes of deunionization. He concludes that the main reason for the decline in US private-sector unionization is increased management op- position to union organization, motivated by such profit-related factors as a rise in the union wage premium, increased foreign competition, and government deregulation policies. Still another factor frequently mentioned in recent years as contributing to the weakening of labor unions is the unskilled labor-displacing nature of new technology, including out- sourcing.

Pros and Cons

There is, however, no general agreement among labor specialists con- cerning the relative importance of these various possible explanations. Initial research into the decline in union membership in the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g., Dickens and Leonard 1985) stresses the importance of shifts in the composition of the labor force and the structure of pro- duction. Later studies de-emphasize this explanation, however, in part because these changes are themselves outcomes to be explained at a more fundamental level. Henry Farber and Alan Krueger (1992) conclude on the basis of survey data that virtually the entire decline in union member- ship from the 1970s to early 1990s was due to a decline in worker de- mand for union representation and that there was almost no change in the relative supply of union jobs. Of course, many of the same basic economic ...