Photo credit: Shane Cottle on Unsplash
Unions on Labor Day
In 2024, 9.9% of U.S. wage and salary workers were union members, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This represented 14.4 million people, a slight decrease from the previous year. The rate has been declining for decades, falling from about one-third of the workforce in the mid-20th century to roughly 10% today (Artificial Intelligence).
The first attack against unions came with the anti-strike provision of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) following the employment boom of World War II. For a time, unions swelled as workers filled jobs created by the post-World War II boom in consumer goods. The housing market exploded as people like me filled the ranks of the baby boom. School enrollment also skyrocketed. It seemed as if the economy would always move upwards, but during the 1970s the global market began the march of industry, large industries like steel, automobiles, and technology, out of the country. Many industrial areas became ghost towns. I lived in a small version of one of those towns in Rhode Island that saw textiles first move to the US South and then to Asia, Southeast Asia, India, and elsewhere.
By 1981, Ronald Reagan, The Great Communicator, sent an anti-union message to the air traffic controllers who were on strike. He fired all of those workers putting the flying public at risk and sending a right-wing message to workers that their collective efforts mattered no more.
I was a union member for 30 years, and then again for six years. I belonged to the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and finally to the union that represented faculty at the community college where I worked. I have mixed feelings about the teachers’ unions to which I belonged. I was an active member of the NEA. However, I saw some of their weaknesses in their questionable support for unqualified teachers. But unqualified teachers are not at the heart of public schooling in the US. Read Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age(1967) and Savage Inequalities (1991) for an assessment of schooling in the US. Also Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) for a view of the attacks against public schooling in the US and the role poverty plays in educating kids. While in the AFT, I objected to some of their national agenda of supporting some right-wing foreign regimes. The coup de grâce of the AFT was their support for the end of public workers’ pension cost-of-living adjustments that had been codified in the agreements of many unions in Rhode Island. Since then, pensions have included crumbs thrown to retirees in the form of infinitesimally small COLAs.
The Trump administration’s antipathy toward workers is apparent in the Department of Government Efficiency he implemented to savage the federal workforce. We’ve come a long way from the New Deal, worker security, and the so-called American Dream! Some of the working class and part of the middle class have been savaged.