Union membership falls in California and nationally

[Newsjock]

Source: Sacramento Bee

The percentage of U.S. workers who were union members fell again last year, according to new data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, California's union membership ranks fell slightly, although the percentage of Golden State union members increased owing to heavier employment losses in non-union jobs.

Nationally, the rate of wage and salary workers who were union members dropped to 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent in 2009, according to this press release. The number of employees belonging to unions declined by 612,000 to 14.7 million.

By comparison, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers in 1983 when the government started tracking the trend.

The percentage of union members in local, state and federal government jobs fell from 37.4 percent to 36.2 percent. Union membership in the private sector dropped from 7.2 percent to 6.9 percent.

Read more: http://blogs.sacbee.com/the_state_worker/2011/01/federal-government-releases-un.html

[ananda]

1. Destroy the unions, create corporate feudal fiefdoms, and...

... make people grateful for the crappy jobs and working conditions they
can get... as the ground is prepared for the dismantling of the forty
hour work week, child labor laws, and the poverty draft to keep up the
endless wars.

Mission accomplished.

[RKP5637]

2. Exactly what is going on - we will move to serfdom and many of the peasants will

cheer how fortunate they are to work 16 hours plus a day every day per week at menial wages.

[Bobbysox22]

3. Why is this happening?

More than a third of the US workforce belonged to unions in the 1950s. Is it the export of industrial jobs that's causing this decline or what?

[AtheistCrusader]

4. My father was a union Electrician.

IBEW Local 48.

My brother and I are not. There really isn't a union in my field of work. Some people have tried to start one, but no one really cares to, because we don't have any real labor dispute issues. (Information Technology)

My brother hasn't joined one, because he isn't interested in doing so. There is a union in his field, but its just not of interest to him.

[Stargazer99]

5. Just wait....when they came for the jews I did not do anything

what the hell makes you think you won't be next? Lack of checking back on history? It may take a while but it will get to that point.

[AtheistCrusader]

8. Probably not.

Also, a little hyperbolic to compare throwing people into political prison and death camps, to current labor issues.

[Bobbysox22]

6. Aren't outsourcing and H1b Visas IT labor issues?

[AtheistCrusader]

9. Not if you expect to work in a global workforce, and plan accordingly.

I expect to, and do compete head to head with people in other countries for my paycheck. Have been for a decade. Not been a problem for me.

It's gotten easier, too, as wages have increased overseas, making outsourcing just that much more unattractive.

[RKP5637]

7. They are depending on complacent workers. I worked in IT and there were lots

and lots of labor issues. I don't know where you are working, but you are lucky in IT to not have any labor issues.

[AtheistCrusader]

10. Haven't been any we can't manage.

The option to organize is always there, if it becomes necessary.

I prefer less overhead on my paycheck.

[RKP5637]

12. That's good to hear, hope it keeps up, must be a good company! n/t

[Xithras]

13. IT departments tend to operate as meritocracies.

You rise or fall based on your skill sets and your mastery of the latest technology. No software developer (or network tech, or anything else) wants to find themselves wants to find himself working alonside some 50 year old COBOL programmer who still swears that FORTRAN is the bees knees when the next request for a RoR HTML5 social app gets dropped on his desk. You know exactly who will be carrying whom.

At least, that's the mindset that IT employers have been wildly successful in putting into everyones heads. I agree that none of us want to work with "that guy", but wouldn't it be better to help the guy retrain and update his skills, instead of just shoving him out the door as happens now? A union can help do that.

[joeglow3]

22. Some of it is from illegal immigrants

My father is a union drywaller in Nebraska. This is a right to work state, but the unions still managed to gain a foothold. However, in the late 1980's-1990's, the numbers of illegal immigrants in their profession shot up. Almost all of the drywall companies went non-union and began to employ illegals. This led to sharp decreases in their salaries. I remember us living from paycheck to paycheck, eating mac and cheese every night. My parents could not afford to buy clothes, so my mother made them. Many of my father's friends ended up losing their houses and a few ended up living on the streets. My father's unions (Local 444) tried like crazy to report the illegals, but no one cared. They finally got the local rag to run a piece on the illegals working on the 9-figure Qwest Center, when everyone claimed shock and "took care of the problem," which really meant moving the illegals to other jobs and moving the few legal workers they had to the Qwest Center.

This is why I always get pissed when people say illegal immigrants "work the jobs Americans won't." That is complete bullshit. It is just that working class Americans cannot survive at the slave wages that result when illegal immigrants flood the labor market (ala Grapes of Wrath).

[Xithras]

11. Read the WHOLE OP and you find that the overall percentage of CA union workers went UP

The overall number of union workers went down. Why? Because a lot of them have been laid off.

But if you read on, you'll find out that nonunion workers were laid off too, and in even higher percentages than the union workers.

This means that union workers are now a larger percentage of the workforce as a whole. If you were in a union, you were less likely to lose your job.

[defendandprotect]

14. That means they are destroying another "FLOOR" under wages ...

the Minimum Wage has almost no meaning any longer -- it's slave wage --

and when unions are finally pulled all pulled down there will be no

protection whatsoever for any living wage!

[freshwest]

15. I'm so sick of living things being treated as dead things.

[defendandprotect]

16. We are all deeply disturbed and heartsick ... but we tried -- and now we have to try again...

Liberals have to stick together and move together as one united voting bloc --

and we have to make decisions about what to do --

Fantacize about that a bit if we really want change to this corporate control of

our government. Keep in mind, it isn't corporations sitting in the White House

or in Congress -- our elected officials are voting to give corporations this

freedom to destroy America.

[freshwest]

18. Thanks for the encouragement. It's needed.

It's as if we don't exist any more, we have been removed from human consciousness, although we know we are here, that we love and care and have alternatives.

Human beings need validation, and sometimes that comes from hearing that other agree. Right now, other than here an a few other places, the only source to see what resonates is the media. But it's reflecting only the thoughts of the most powerful and corrupt.

It's a tool that is being wielded as never before, and the only ones whose viewpoints are being reflected are those who have defined their reality that way. They deny that there is any other way to live.

And their followers have made it their cause to forcibly convert the rest of us to a system which never worked for most of living beings. Not historically, not presently and certainly won't let to a future we want for ourselves and our posterity.

:fistbump:

[jtuck004]

17. Maybe it's time for unions to move to a different realm

We are looking at, perhaps, at least 15 to 20 years before we can get back to 6% unemployment or so, maybe longer. And that is if all the jobs that used to exist are replaced with home health aide and Dollar General retail clerk jobs. And those don't provide enough disposable income to provide for other jobs, (teachers, police, fire, general government come easily to mind) so even that strategy is suspect, 'cause some of those people will be working at Dollar General too. Such as the teacher who is not in the new classroom opened in Florida, where it is just students, computers, and a "facilitator".

What's a union going to look like after 20 years of that?

Outside of that there is no job growth engine readily visible on our horizon. No ARPANET gonna turn into an Internet, no massive need to build refineries or processing plants requiring lots of labor. And when we do build modern plants, they need far less labor than the old ones.

Our competitors are educating and training their population, working at prices we cannot compete with GIVEN our existing structure, with board members a CEO making 500 or 600 times the pay of the average person. The CEO and board are quite happy with the jobs or profit markup coming from out of the country. Would a company made up of people who have a personal stake in the assets and what happens to them be more likely to do whatever needs to be done to make sure the company benefits the community they live in than a company made up of workers who may have the same goal, but live without the power to really control the assets.

So maybe it's time for the members of the unions to use their assets to train their employees how to compete in a globalized world?
Learning things like how to create and work in a true employee-owned and managed business, how to become a member of a cooperative, run a business, create and market products, MBA\CPA stuff.

Because if you own assets YOU determine how they are best used. Unlike today, if you need to work for less, so can everyone else. But this also opens up the door to other ways to compete which an owner who is being paid handsomely under the current system is simply not motivated to pursue? In other words, do the things that compete effectively.

It opens up lots of question of capital, training, what the solution REALLY is in a globalized world, and it might not be the thing to do. And it is certainly gonna cause the death of the union. I mean, one could unionize Dollar General Stores, but who would want to? If that is your society better start razing homes and shutting schools and hospitals down - we cannot afford what we have on that.

And I realize this scrapping of the adversarial relationship works toward the end of a union as organized today. But are the choices owning a little piece of something, or fighting over scraps to the bitter end?

I don't know.

[robcon]

19. Huh? "at least 15 to 20 years before we can get back to 6% unemployment or so"????

Based on what? We'll be there in a couple of years.

[jtuck004]

20. About 30 million of our neighbors need work.

Some sites say more - but the BLS numbers are based on a monthly census with a long history. There is a black box of statistical manipulation in there that does seem to vary considerably more than it should on a month-to-month basis, but over time seems to move back toward what would make sense. But these numbers are good enough to work with.

That 30 million includes people who are unemployed, tens of millions who need to work full-time but the hours aren't there, nearly a million and a half who are so dis-heartened and tired of rejection they haven't looked in the last 4 weeks. I heard the other day our local state unemployment service has about 600 jobs on their logs, but about 30,000 people looking. And that doesn't count the other 50 people in line in countries like China, Vietnam, India where people will do that job for pennies on the dollars employers here would pay.

According to the head of the BLS at various times, without even touching the unemployed we need about 130K to 150K jobs each month just to employ those entering the work force. So to decrease the unemployment numbers we need more than that. To get us back to 5-6% would require that we employ about 20 million people - not only those who are completely unemployed (about 15 million, but millions of people who are working part-time not by choice, and the millions who will re-enter active looking and working from either end of the far spectrum once there are enough jobs for everyone - not one for every 6, or 10, or 50 people.

Let's say we create 300,000 jobs every month - 150K for people entering the market, 150K for the unemployed. It would be 2021 before we reached around 6% unemployment.

But that is still a pipe dream - Here's the last year's job creation in thousands from the BLS announcements.

Jan 14
Fed 39
Mar 208
Apr 313
May 432
June -221
July -131
Aug -54
Sep -95K
Oct 151K
Nov 39K
Dec 103K

That rather pathetic average is about 66 thousand jobs a month. Notice the big months when the temporary census jobs inflated the numbers. Take those away and it looks worse than grim.

So unless something big changes, and except for one month, and three others where the once in a decade Census offered full-time temporary jobs,we have not yet demonstrated that we can create enough jobs to do that.

Let's look back in history at the greatest job creation during the term of any modern president:


AVG Monthly
233
321
179
233
280
250
264
163

So even with the help of the newly emerging Internet, and the Y2K scare that employed tens of thousands to update and install systems, there was only 1 month in the entire Clinton administration that we reached 300K.

And look at the jobs we are creating. The VAST majority are home health care, retail, travel and leisure industry. About 1 in 3 people now have an income of $20,000 a year or LESS.

So as we get all these people employed, these people who used to make $40K, $60K, $80,000 a year, working for 1/4 of what they used to get. Now all their money goes to house payments, food, gas. No money left for taxes for schools, police, fire. No money left for buying things other people might make. Tried to raise 1 kid, or 1, on anything approaching $20K a year. How much you have left over every month?

Even as we get people employed, we are losing others. The majority of the states are insolvent. Employing people in jobs that pay 1/4 of the taxes that they used to pay is going to cause state governments to cut people - teachers, others.

Now you have to employ them as well.

I am not sure people are looking at the ways in which the government is propping up our economy, and where those efforts are starting to fail. There are still hundreds of billions going to the reserve banks, who can still borrow at .0734 and loan out at 3,5,7,24%, or 124%. The Financial Accounting Board (FASB) STILL has a rule in place that says banks must value homes at the mythical level they were at during the boom - else banks would be shutting their doors by the thousands. States have been relying on the fed to pay them for these long weeks of unemployment, to pay money that used to support education - all of that is ending, slowly but surely.

Oh yeah, and there is a $2pointsomething TRILLION shortfall in pension funds. Like the little town in (Alabama?) that recently quit sending pension checks to their retired employees (that's illegal, but they ran out of money) there may be tens of thousands of people emerging from retirement to look for work soon. There go all those calculations...

So throw any figure in there that suits you. Think we can create 200K private sector jobs a month? That's 50,000 a month off of unemployment. that's 33.3 years, or about April of 2041.

That's why I think at least 20 years - and that is not only not gonna be a fun 20 years, what we have at the end may not be anyone's idea of the good life.

[AtheistCrusader]

21. Assumes two things.

(Not putting this in a negative way, just pointing out...)

No emmigration of skilled workers to emerging economies. I've already been abroad once to teach skills, looks like another trip is coming up. Many of my co-workers have done multi-year stints in other countries doing the same thing. We don't get downsized, because we are valuable for this purpose (emerging economies lead to high turnover rates, shockingly high rates), and in a 'follow the sun' service model.

I guarantee, if the US staglfates for 10 years, we will see skilled workers fleeing the country to other economies where their skills are highly valued, and the standard of living can be met by the local wages.

No emerging technologies/new industries. Granted, we are momentarily getting our butts kicked in green energy technology production, but we are re-opening domestic mining, and manufacturing around rare earth materials, precisely for this reason. Expect to see ajdustments in EPA regulations as well, as some of the processes around making certain solar panels and such, are somewhat toxic.


You point out an important factor, the total job growth during boom years, but there are some tricks around that as well, where job positions have simply gone unfilled for 2 years, not counting as 'new' heads, when finally filled.

It's ugly out there, no argument from me, but we have opportunities, if only we will take them.
My advice to anyone in school right now: LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE. Hindi. Mandarin. Spanish. Even Russian.

[jtuck004]

23. I like thoughtful replies.

;)

The emigration would hurt us, no? 'Cause those salaries will primarily benefit the local economies where the government cares about wealth creation and their people.

I had lunch with a polysilicone engineer who is helping China get one of their plants online. He said that was what he he had to do to get work, since the U.S. sold or moved all that to China. Interesting - said they had built a whole factory, a whole process for creating the material, yet they didn't have enough knowledge to understand that they were creating the material they intended to. They didn't know how to work the test machines, so he had to show them how to measure the output - they thought it was contaminated - he showed them that their process was working perfectly.

But the only benefit we get from that is when he visits the U.S. and spends a bit on travel (also turns out the Chinese like products from here - even if they were built in China, there is some thought that the things we sell here are superior - so he buys a few cameras and cell phones for people when he returns to work). Otherwise he lives, and spends his money, overseas.

I agree with your suggestion about the language. It's a global world, and that is not going away. I had thought Chinese (Mandarin) might be good, but the others might not be as popular, which might make one more marketable. 'Cause things change.

The worst part of all this I don't think we are going to respond appropriately. I know there are some opportunities opening, but its not nearly enough, not nearly enough. We are at least a couple decades and perhaps 30 to $50 trillion dollars behind where we should be. It would take us that much time and money to build ourselves back to being really competitive. We would not only have to rebuild factories to a current technological level, but re-educate and re-train a huge number of people, and all of that (including keeping people fed and housed) would likely have to be fronted by the government, since our policies have not only encouraged debt but made it most necessary just to live somewhat of a modern life and people don't have any money for housing, tuition, etc.

Anything short of a commitment of that size is just window dressing to kick the can down the road. But people forget there is a cliff at the end of the road we are on.

Thank you for that...

[ProudDad]

26. Your "global world" is floating on a sea of cheap oil

and the oil's running out...

And it's destroying the natural web of life and resources as it "grows"...

which will soon choke its "growth"...

It's called the 2nd law of Thermodynamics and you can't ignore it...

Get used to it...

[jtuck004]

27. Absolutely.

We have lived a long time on "cheap" oil, cheap "power", and cheap water (there are costs that are not seen as directly tied to those, but they are costs of those items nonetheless, as you alluded to) and one of these days it is all going to make these look like the good ol' days. As China is putting 1500 new cars a day on the road, that day may come sooner than we imagined.

There will never be a time as good as the present to build a more local, sustainable, job-rich environment to move forward in. And the longer we delay, the higher the costs.

[ProudDad]

29. We are in accord, my friend...

:hi:

[ProudDad]

25. USAmerica will NEVER be "back to 6% unemployment" again...

Unless they change the way "unemployment" is calculated AGAIN...

If it were calculated as it was during Carter today's number would be about 15% +...

And to answer your question directly, "Based on what?" based on the fact that the resources aren't there to support this ponzi-scheme laughingly called an "economy" any more...

We've hit the limits on "unlimited growth" on a finite planet, bunky...

[ProudDad]

24. Well, the Employee Free Choice Act will take care of that!!!

Uh, what?

Oh, Never Mind...

[Taverner]

28. Seriously, we need to find and strengthen an IT Union

Who ever is with me, is with me