Doug Henwood's Blog, page 41

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January 31, 2019 Jamieson Webster, author of this article, on what we miss when we muffle our symptoms with psychiatric drugs • John Patrick Leary, author of Keywords, on the language of contemporary capitalism

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January 24, 2019 Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union and Jane McAlevey, author and organizer, on the union’s great victory in their LA strike, protecting public education against the plutocrats’ attacks

Union density update: back to 1900 levels

Sam Gindin pointed me to a history of private sector union density—the percent of workers belonging to unions—going back to 1900. (They’re credit to Troy and Sheflin’ Union Sourcebook, a standard source.) No doubt these numbers are more approximate than recent ones, but here’s a striking fact: 2018’s level, 6.4%, is a hair below 1900’s level, 6.5%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say they’re the same.

Here’s an update of yesterday’s graph.

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Back where the 20th century started. That’s 118 years of progress for you.

Union density hits record low

Union density—the share of employed workers belonging to unions—fell to 10.5% in 2018, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began reporting the data in its modern form in 1964, down from 2017’s 10.7%. (See graph below.) After rising 0.1 point in 2017, private sector density fell back to match 2016’s 6.4%, the lowest since stats began in 1929. Republican governors’ war on public sector unions is having a visible effect: just 33.9% of government workers belonged to unions last year, the lowest since 1978, when membership was on an upswing—an effect that is only going to intensify as the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Janus case, which forbids mandatory payment of union dues, spreads.

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There’s an old lie that unions are good for white men and no one else. That’s the opposite of the case. As the graph below shows, black women, for example, earn 63% as much per week as white men overall; belonging to a union brings that up to 78%—still a large gap, but a much smaller one. Nonunion Latinas earn 60% as much as white men; a union brings that up to 83%. And, as a team of researchers from the Economic Policy Institute argues, unions can raise the level of nonunion workers if they’re prevalent enough in a geographical area or industrial sector. No wonder employers hate them.

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Union density varies widely by state, as this map shows. They’re strongest in the Northeast and far West, mixed in the Midwest, and weak in the South and interior West.

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Changes in union density also vary widely by state. Since 2000, density is down 3.0 points. It was down in every state (including DC) but three. Losses were small in high-density Massachusetts and low-density Alabama and North Carolina. Density was down hard in states where reactionary governors made war on organized labor—most notably, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, but even Chris Christie in liberal New Jersey. New York, the state with the second-highest union density in the country, 22.3%, saw an above-average loss of 3.2 points.

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There are signs of life in the labor movement, most recently the spectacular victory by the Los Angeles teachers, following upon the upsurge in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma last spring. And we’ve seen some organizing in the electronic media. These are extremely cheering signs. But we’re going to need a lot more of this if the erosion of working-class living standards is ever going to be reversed.

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January 17, 2019 Andrew Bacevich tries to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy • Steven Maher (author of this article) on the rise and fall of GE

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January 10, 2019 Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, on the history, theory, and practice of the doctrine

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January 3, 2019 Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough, on the paradox of human rights discourse arising alongside great inequality, and on the difference between poverty reduction and income compression

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December 27, 2018 Wilson Sherwin, a grad student at CUNY writing on the welfare rights movement, on that and its relation to anti-/post-work politics • Marta Silva Cabral and Forrest Hylton look at Brazil on the eve of Bolsonaro’s inauguration

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December 13, 2018 Robert Pollin, lead author of this paper, on how to pay for Medicare for All—covering everyone and saving money • Anton Jäger, author of this article, on the problems with the anti-/post-work position

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December 6, 2018 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, on the politics of guns