14.6 million union members

According to a report issued yesterday by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.6 million wage and salary workers were union members in this country last year, down slightly from the 2005 level.

The 2006 union membership rate for private industry workers was 7.4 percent, while the rate for all government workers was 36.2 percent.

Why the great disparity between the private and public sectors unionization rate?

One good reason is that about one-third of the workers in the private sector are not entitled to union representation under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Private sector employees excluded from union representation by law include: self-employed individuals, domestic workers, farm workers, workers employed by a parent or spouse, confidential employees, supervisors, and managerial employees.

In a 2005 paper, Paula B Voos of Rutgers University described the very different situation in the public sector:

Even though public sector labor relations statutes commonly have been modeled after the NLRA in many respects, they also have major differences both from that law and from one another. When Adrienne Eaton and I reviewed these statutes in 2002, we found that eleven of them provided collective bargaining rights not only for first-level supervisors, but also for individuals at higher levels in the management hierarchy; these states were Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Washington. New Jersey, for instance, gives rights to employees up to the level of "managerial executive." Hence, a greater proportion of the workforce is eligible for union representation in the public sector.

If a greater proportion of a given workforce is eligible for union representation, it only stands to reason that the union membership rate is going to be higher in that workforce. Although the eligibility factor accounts for a goodly portion of the disparity between the private and public sectors unionization rates, it doesn't account for all of it.

Another significant factor for the disparity is the huge and ongoing losses of unionized manufacturing jobs in this country. Deindustrialization over the past decades has cost millions of union members their good-paying jobs. Technology can account for the loss of many of those jobs, but millions of manufacturing jobs were also exported overseas or to Mexico, a phenomena that hasn't been seen yet with federal, state or local government jobs. In 1950 about one-third of all jobs in this country were in manufacturing. By 2005, however, manufacturing represented only about 11 percent of all U.S. employment. But, considering that only about half of those manufacturing jobs are jobs typically open for union representation (the remainder are sales, design, distribution, financial planning, clerical, and human resources positions, etc.), it's not really surprising to see a report of only a 7.4 percent unionization rate in the private sector.

However, I think the biggest reason behind the disparity is corporate resistance to unionization, which is vastly more prevalent in the private sector than in the public. Many of the governmental entities that allow for some sort of labor relations activities with their public employees are officially neutral with respect to discouraging or encouraging their employees to unionize. I'm not saying that employer resistance is nonexistent in the public sector, just that it doesn't at all come close to the wretched level in the private sector. In a recent study on this issue the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that:

[U]nion membership in the United States is not declining because workers no longer want or need unions. Instead, falling union density is directly related to employers’ near universal and systematic use of legal and illegal tactics to stymie workers’ union organizing.

Kate Bronfenbrenner's widely referenced and highly respected September 2000 report to the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission found that sixty-eight percent of manufacturing employers made threats to close all or part of the plant during the organizing drive.

Not only are threats of plant closing an extremely pervasive part of employer campaigns, her report also found they are very effective: "The election win rate associated with campaigns where the employer made plant closing threats is, at 38 percent, significantly lower than the 51 percent win rate found in units where no threats occurred."

Here are a few more statistics compiled by the AFL-CIO on private-sector employer resistance to unionization:

Employers that illegally fire at least one worker for union activity during organizing campaigns: 25%
Employers that hire consultants or union-busters to help them fight union organizing drives: 75%
Employers that force employees to attend one-on-one meetings with their own supervisors against the union: 78%
Employers that force employees to attend mandatory, closed-door meetings against the union: 92%
Employers that threaten to call the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during organizing drives that include undocumented employees: 52%
Workers in 2003 who received back pay because of illegal employer discrimination for activities legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act: 23,144
Percentage of unions newly formed by workers whose employers do not agree to a first contract within two years: 45%
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Sources: Kate Bronfenbrenner, Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages and Union Organizing, Cornell University, Sept. 6, 2000; Human Rights Watch, Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards, 2000; Membership survey for the AFL-CIO, Peter D. Hart Research Associates, 2005; National Labor Relations Board annual reports; Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service annual report, 2004.

Employer suppression of unionization and a dysfunctional labor law is so egregious in the private sector that in 2000, Human Rights Watch published a report that concluded:

"[L]egal obstacles tilt the playing field so steeply against freedom of association that the United States is in violation of international human rights standards for workers."

Clearly, the evidence is overwhelming, all of the cards in the deck are stacked against U.S. private-sector workers who dare to form or join a labor union. Research, though, shows that 59 percent of currently unorganized American workers would like to have collective bargaining agent. There can be little doubt that overt employer opposition is a major cause of this unfulfilled demand--and a major cause of the disparity between the private and public sectors unionization rate.