Union Membership Down; Experts Say HRfs Responsiveness May Be a Reason
By Allen Smith, J.D.
Feb 10, 2017 - SHRM
The percentage of U.S. workers who were union members
fell 0.4 percent to 10.7 percent in 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS) reported Jan. 26. Some labor relations experts say that part of the reason
for a decline in union membership can be due to HR, as the nation's unions have
a harder time convincing workers to join when HR and other business leaders are
responsive to employees' concerns.
Public-sector workers had a union membership rate of
34.4 percent, more than five times higher than that of private-sector workers at
6.4 percent. Teachers, police officers and firefighters had the highest
unionization rates. In the private sector, industries with high unionization
rates included utilities (21.5 percent), transportation and warehousing (18.4
percent), telecommunications (14.6 percent), construction (13.9 percent), and
educational services (12.3 percent). Private educational services include
private colleges and universities.
The number of workers in total who belonged to unions
was 14.6 million in 2016, declining by 240,000 from 2015, according to the
BLS.
Reasons for the Drop
"Business leaders, now more than ever, get it when it
comes to positive employee relations," said Jim Gray of Jim Gray Consultants, a
labor relations consultancy, in Charleston, S.C. "Accelerated employee
engagement and personal development efforts—especially attractive to younger
generations—are making union representation unnecessary."
In addition, unionized companies aren't very
competitive, said Phillip Wilson, president and general counsel of the Labor
Relations Institute in Broken Arrow, Okla. He said that unions are slow to
change, "which is one of the problems with the collective bargaining process.
When a company is slow to adapt to changing market conditions—especially in
today's economy—that company is dead."
But David
Madland, senior advisor to the American Worker Project at the Center for
American Progress Action Fund in Washington, D.C., said in a press release, "Now
more than ever, workers need a real say in the economy and in politics. Even
though the majority of Americans support labor unions, attacks
by right-wing politicians have hurt the only real voice that workers
control. Union membership, which has been on the decline for years as a result
of these tactics, dropped even further this past year."
Kate Bronfenbrenner, senior lecturer and director of
labor education research at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations
in Ithaca, N.Y., attributed the drop in union membership partly to the 2016
presidential election. "Unions always lose members in presidential election
years," she said. "Every four years it happens because resources and staff are
transferred away from organizing to primary campaigns."
Changes in the law have also had a big effect on union
membership, according to Bronfenbrenner. "I believe the biggest drop comes from
the loss of collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers and loss of
members in states that had major changes in collective bargaining legislation,
such as Wisconsin," she said. And after the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in
Harris v. Quinn, which held that home care workers who don't support a
union can't be forced to pay a fee to the union, the Service Employees
International Union lost large numbers of home care workers, she added.
Employers use threats of outsourcing to win
concessions from unions. Then after they get the concessions, some employers cut
"all or part of the jobs anyway," she said.
Michael Lotito, an attorney with Littler and co-chair
of the firm's government affairs division, the Workplace Policy Institute, said
that a decline in union membership has been happening since 1955. He said that
when the National Labor Relations Act was enacted in 1935, "the way employers
treated employees was vastly different than they do today. Now, the vast
majority of employers treat their employees with dignity and respect, and
provide for open dialogue and complaint resolution systems, competitive pay and
benefits, and a workplace that outlaws discrimination and harassment. Many
government agencies, local and state and federal, provide employees with
workplace protections without dues obligations. Given all of these changes that
value workers, unions have had difficulty articulating a value
proposition."
Said Wilson: "Despite all of the negative PR [public
relations] unions like to heap on U.S. businesses, the fact is that most working
people do not believe they are mistreated or need the protection of a union."
Higher Pay
One argument for organized labor has been that
unionized workers are often paid more than employees who are not unionized.
As the BLS stated in its press release on the union
membership decline, among full-time hourly and salaried workers, union members
had median weekly earnings of $1,004 in 2016, while those who were not union
members had median weekly earnings of $802.
However, this earnings difference reflects a variety
of influences, including variations in the distributions of union members and
nonunion employees by occupation, industry, age, firm size and geographic
region, the BLS said.
Many union members live in states that have cities
with high costs of living, the BLS statistics show. For example, the largest
numbers of union members live in California (2.6 million) and New York (1.9
million).
Over half of the 14.6 million union members in the
U.S. live in just seven states. In addition to California and New York, that
includes:
- Illinois: 800,000.
- Pennsylvania: 700,000.
- Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio: each at 600,000.
Granted, not all areas of these states have high costs
of living.