“Which Side are You On?”

In the halcyon days of union organizing in the U.S., decades ago, when coal miners were battling for safer conditions and union recognition in Kentucky, it was a common question to ask. While modern unions found traction and legal protection under federal law in the 1930s (the Wagner Act created the National Labor Relations board in 1935), attempts to organize labor in the United States tracks well back into the 19^th century. The efforts were often tainted with violence and repression, often supported by local authorities: “Driven by wage cuts and poor working conditions, violent outbreaks of strikes and a long series of battles occurred all over the country during the 1870s. In 1877, around the coal mining region of Mauch Chunk and Pottsville, Pennsylvania, a secret miners' association called the Molly Maguires, mostly comprising Irish Catholics, burned buildings, controlled county officials, and murdered bosses and supervisors who offended them. Finally, the murderers were apprehended and brought to trial. The hanging of 10 of those men in 1877, effectively broke up the ‘Mollies.’

“Also in 1877, unorganized railroad workers struck because of a 10 percent wage cut, the second cut since the Panic of 1873. They brought to a screeching halt four Eastern rail trunk lines, which caused turmoil in every industrial center. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Martinsburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois; the Great Strike of 1877 sparked battles between militia and the crowds. Only after federal soldiers were brought in, was ordered restored.” U-S-history.com.

Private union membership peaked in 1958 with 30% of the American private workforce in unions, and even as recently as 1980, that number was 20%. According to the January 22, 2009 New York Times, as recently as 2009, well over a third of American government workers were in some form of collective bargaining unit – more government members than all of the private sector membership combined. But hard times, high unemployment, profoundly contracting state and local budgets – with deficits everywhere – and a conservative wave of populist resentment over strong healthcare and retirement benefits, have taken union membership to new lows – numbers that haven’t been seen since the beginning of the twentieth century. “Last year union membership fell to 11.9 percent of all workers, and just 6.9 percent of the private sector. The number of major strikes in 2009 and 2010 was the lowest on record... In the 1970s, the nation saw an average of 269 major strikes or lockouts each year. The number has dropped precipitously ever since, to 17 per year over the past decade. The five in 2009 were the fewest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started counting in 1947.” AOLNews.com, March 19^th.

Bankruptcies of major automakers sent a shiver down the spines of investors and union members alike, as all those luscious benefits, negotiated over decades of difficult labor wars, went down in flames as GM and Chrysler reorganized. ERISA pension insurance preserved a modicum of retirement benefits in the shambles of the bankruptcies, which were mirrored all over the United States in smaller but comparable occurrences. But the writing was on the wall; organized labor was not remotely the power player it used to be.

The showdowns over government unions, spurred by state and local governments running out of cash to fund current operations but completely unable to support the trillions in unfunded but accrued pension and post-retirement health benefits promised to hordes of government workers, came to a head in Wisconsin, where public collective bargain actually began in 1959. Whether the new anti-collective bargaining legislation, signed into law by Republican Governor Scott Walker after a tumultuous battle between fleeing State Senate Democrats and the Republicans who remained behind to vote, sustains or not is in the hands of the courts… with a preliminary ruling against the new law. But what is clear is that the days where politicians quivered in fear over the machinations of union leaders are over. Labor was completely asleep at the switch, in complete denial that the campaign rhetoric of the Wisconsin politicians, promising to crush the government unions if elected, would ever really be implemented. Parallel movements in Ohio and Indiana – home of blue collar workers and now simply referred to as the “rust belt” – tracked the conservative sentiment in Wisconsin.

The trend has been a long time in the making, as AOLNews.com illustrates: “The decline of unions in the private sector mirrored the push to globalization, especially the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to other countries and the shift of other factories from the longtime industrial heartland to states less hospitable to organized labor... Companies took an increasingly aggressive stance against union organizers, emboldened by the Reagan administration's firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. That act was taken as a wink to the corporate world that the long-established order was upended and that business, too, could play rough.” Has the pendulum swung too far from the union side? The majority of Americans still believe government workers have a right to bargain collectively, and the Democrats still draw heavy financial support from organized labor. Will there b e a sustainable backlash against the anti-union movement, will better times and higher employment reverse the trend, or is organized labor in America a passing phase of our history? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the only certain thing about the future is that massive change is inevitable.