This past week, President Biden announced the formation of a White House task force to promote labor organizing in an attempt to potentially use the power of the federal government to reverse a decades-long decline in American union membership. Some of this may have been brought on by the recent failed attempt by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to organize 6,000 workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Amazon has argued that its management did not threaten or intimidate workers. However, past evidence has shown that Amazon is more than capable of dissuading its workers from joining a union in its more than 800 warehouses which employ over 500,000 people nation-wide. While Amazon did not admit to violations of labour laws, the company promised in a settlement with federal regulators to tell workers that it would rigorously obey the rules in the future. Good luck!
The historical decline in union membership in the U.S. is well documented. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of union members fell by 400,000 in 2012, to 14.3 million, even though the nation’s overall employment rose by 2.4 million. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011. By 2017, union membership was 14.8 million, representing just 10.7 percent of those workers. The unionization rate for private-sector workers was only 6.3 percent in 2020, reflecting the net effect of declines in both the number of union members in the private sector and the steep drop in private-sector employment.
Private sector membership particularly declined sharply in the manufacturing sector largely due to the reality that when organized labour dug in its heels, manufacturing companies never thought twice about shutting a factory and transferring production to another country. Now, the largest sectors involve service industries and high tech companies which are very difficult to organize, especially among low paying jobs and where turnover is high. Lifetime job security once offered by unions in the manufacturing sector no longer exists, leaving workers vulnerable to company pressures not to organize. In some cases, as in high tech, companies offer enough benefits to make the need for unions a thing of the past. Management-side lawyers argue convincingly that many employers have gotten better over the years at heeding workers’ concerns, making unions less necessary. William Spriggs, the A.F.L.- C.I.O.’s chief economist, acknowledged that unions were doing poorly in manufacturing, retail and elsewhere in the private sector, which has been adding jobs even as union membership continued a slide that has lasted for decades.
The primary piece of federal legislation governing federal labour rights is the National Labor Relations Act which has been around since 1935. It was explicitly introduced to encourage collective bargaining, but that the law had never been fully carried out in this regard. The principal federal agency established by the Act, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), has no power to impose monetary penalties against employers who openly obstruct union membership drives. The NLRB’s enforcement remedies are few and weak, which means its ability to restrain anti-union employers from breaking the law is limited.
The situation in Canada is somewhat the same. Since Statistics Canada began measuring unionization through household surveys, the overall unionization rate within Canada’s private sector (15.2% in 2014) has been declining for over 30 years. This was partially offset by high public sector union density (71.3% in 2014). The growth of the service sectors in both countries is not expected to significantly change labour markets in the near future. It will be difficult to organize workers in companies such as Amazon and Walmart, and there is little that governments can do. Regulatory bodies can simply ensure that the rules are being followed, but they cannot force workers to join unions. While the Biden administration may be able to bring the National Labor Relations Act into the Twenty-First century, the fact is that economic and industrial changes will most likely determine future unionization rates. Despite the fact that President Biden is a strong supporter of unions, there is only so much that he can do to reverse the existing decline in these rates. And that’s not much!
FROLITICKS 