Opinion Editorial | |
| Monday, February 1, 1999 | |
The Union Wage Premium Declines |
Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released data on union membership in 1998. Once again, the figures show unionization falling as a share of the labor force. In 1997, 14.1 percent of all wage and salary workers belonged to a union; last year that percentage fell to 13.9 percent. As recently as 1983, more than 20 percent of all workers belonged to a union; in the mid-1950s more than a third did so.
One factor likely to cause further union erosion is the declining union wage premium.
If this trend continues many union members are going to ask what they are getting for their dues.
The AFL-CIO tried to put the best face possible on the continuing decline of union influence. It noted that although the percentage fell, the actual number of union members rose by about 100,000, following several years of absolute declines. It also predicted that the results of some recent successful organizing campaigns will boost this year's total. However, given the economic problems in the steel industry and other manufacturing industries, as the result of the Asian financial crisis, any union gains are likely to be offset by corporate downsizing.
Since layoffs and downsizing are a major reason for declining unionization, it explains why unions have put so much effort into organizing government workers. Government, it seems, is one place that never downsizes. As a consequence, government workers now account for almost 43 percent of all union workers in the U.S., up from one-third in 1983. This means that private sector workers are a declining share of the union labor force, and will probably be a minority in another decade.
The growth of government workers within the union movement has important implications for it. While one can argue that the interests of all private sector union members are in a sense linked, the same cannot be said for those of government and private workers. That is because the wages of government workers come at the expense of private workers in the form of higher taxes. As Alex Rose, late head of the United Hatters union, once observed, governments are not employers in the traditional sense because profits do not exist. "Workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes," he said.
Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, February 1, 1999.
For BLS press text ftp://146.142.4.23/pub/news.release/union2.txt
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