This is Queso. And beans does not like to be picked up. —Oh, Beans is big!
—This is Beans. Yes. Oh, so sweet! This is Cameron. He's one of our subscribers. He lives in Indiana
with his high school sweetheart. And he sent us this question about unions. How come we've seen such a decline
in unionization in the U.S. and specifically why the unions
from manufacturing didn't transfer over into services? Here's what he's talking about. The share of workers in the U.S. who belong to a labor union
like I do, has fallen to around 10%. If you take out the government
employees, it's 6%. And have you ever been part of a union? It sounds like you haven't. No, I haven't. What got me interested in the question
was just the recent news especially around Starbucks. —"Starbucks workers in upstate New York..."
—"...Santa Cruz...". —"...Philedelphia..."
—"...Mesa, Arizona..." —"...more than 20..."
—"...30..." —"...100..."
—"...200 Starbucks locations..." "...voted in favor of joining a union so far." Unions have been catching some
momentum here in the U.S. And if we can make sense
of the historical decline we might understand what it would take
to reverse it. Answering big questions like this
usually involves answering a bunch of smaller questions. And the first one that popped into my head was "Did union density decline
in other countries, too?" And the answer is yes. Meaning that some of the decline reflects
international trends. What happened was that as these economies
grew over time, globalization and automation steered job growth away from domestic factories
where union membership was high. Instead, it went mostly into service
providing jobs where unions weren't well established. All new workplaces in the U.S. are born non-union. So when you chart the total number
of union members in the U.S. against the huge growth in the workforce,
it looks less like the unions collapsed then that the economy
kind of grew outside of them. There's a new paper out by
an economist named Zachary Schaller and it estimates that around 40% of the decline
in union elections in the U.S. can be explained by this growth
and change across sectors. But he found that union elections fell
within sectors, too, which means that most of the decline
was caused by something else, something that explains how we ended up
with even lower union membership than other similar countries like Canada. Cam, check out this chart. It compares union membership in the U.S. to that of our neighbor up north. Okay. So this graph is really interesting. The U.S.'s union density peaked way
earlier than I thought it did. Way back in the 1950s,
I thought that was in the eighties. Oh, and also this paper has a similar chart
that just shows the private sector data. So I'll drop that in here too. The steepest drops in private sector union density came in the 80s,
but it was already falling by then. Which made me wonder: what triggered these
steep declines that started in the 1970s? I can hear you but I can't see you... I asked historian Nelson Lichtenstein
to walk me through it. In the immediate postwar period. You know, in the fifties and sixties, there was a sense American capitalism works. Unions are functional
to a kind of consumer society. "Free enterprise and capitalism,
which the communist despise have given the American worker the highest
standard of living in the world." I mean, everyone's going to have a
suburban house and a Chevy in the driveway. And that led to this kind of stolid
complacency. Unions negotiated some solid wages
and benefits during the economic boom after World War II. Their main weight was in the building
trades and manufacturing. And frankly, you know, they saw,
you know, what is the typical worker? Well, sort of some white male,
you know, Midwestern manufacturing. There was a kind of, you know, sexism. Well, we don't need to organize
these retail clerks. They're all, you know, women. They're just there for pin money
or something. So, sure that, yes,
one could properly criticize the union movement, especially then. If the process of forming a union
is like hiking up a hill and the slope of that hill is set
by economic conditions. You'd want to make a push
when the unemployment rate is low, because going into the 1970s,
that hill got a lot steeper. Inflation went through the roof. Unemployment jumped. Imports were cutting into
industrial profits. And employers respond to these pressures
with an anti-union assault. They moved factories to the south
to avoid union labor. You see an increase in companies
hiring anti-union consulting firms and permanently replacing
striking workers. And this strategy gets a boost
from Ronald Reagan in 1981. "This morning at 7 a.m., the union representing those
who man Americas air traffic control facilities
called a strike." Technically, federal employees aren't allowed to strike, but that
hadn't been enforced before. Well, after the union refused
a counter offer Reagan fired 11,000 striking workers. "There just is no other choice." It was a signal. It was a signal was the first time
the federal government had had been behind the destruction of a union
for many decades. And every manager in
the country said we can we can do things we couldn't do before. Which leads me to ask: what role has government policy played in the union decline? Here's the process established by U.S. law. First, at least 30% of workers at a shop
need to sign a petition saying they want a union. At this point, their employer
can voluntarily recognize them like Vox Media did. Otherwise, they go to a
secret ballot election. If a majority of voters says, yes,
the employer is now obligated to bargain with the union, but they're not obligated
to ever agree on a contract. For those that do, it takes on average
409 days, according to Bloomberg Law. I called up sociologist Barry Eidlin to
find out how this is different in Canada. If you don't have a contract by the end
of the year in most parts of Canada, then the negotiations
get referred to an arbitrator who can then impose an agreement. That doesn't actually get used a lot. But the fact that that's the end point
completely shifts the incentive structure. U.S. policy allows plenty of opportunities
for delay. In Canada, the time between the petition
and the election is limited to 5 to 10 days. In the U.S., it takes 46 days on average. During that time, supervisors can pull workers into mandatory meetings
advising them to vote no. That's all legal. Firing workers for organizing is not. Coming out of college one of my first jobs
was as a manager in a warehouse and I got to see a little bit of what the anti-union kind of talk was all about. When someone that was hourly
just mentioned it and the general manager
put us into one of the operations manager's offices, it's a really small,
really crammed. We're all standing up and he just says,
if anyone says— can I like, curse? Because he cursed. —Are you fine? Yeah, he said it.
—Absolutely. He said, if anyone hears,
the fucking word union. I want you to tell me. I want you to make sure that person
doesn't say it to anyone else. That just kind of stuck with me, and
everyone just accepted it for what it was. Was there any other talk of organizing among the workforce
that you were aware of? No, no. The person that mentioned organizing was fired, I want to say,
maybe four or five weeks later. There was a real effort to document
every single thing that he did that could be considered an infraction. So he could get written up.
We stacked those all up until he qualified to be fired
and he was fired immediately. If an employer gets caught retaliating
against an organizer in the U.S., they have to "promise not to do it again", reinstate the worker, and award back pay. Minus whatever wages they had earned from
other employment that they had sought. It's not even the full amount that they
would have earned if they were on the job. And meanwhile, they send a message
to the other workers that, you know, this is what happens
when you try to unionize and they get to engage in the anti-union campaign
without a key leader in place. So it just makes no sense to obey the law. Since the 1930s, changes
to labor law in the U.S. have generally limited the tactics
unions can use, while making it easier for management to make their voice heard. But even if you change those laws, you still need workers
who are willing to fight. Hey, Cam it's Joss. Just sending over some news
out of New Jersey from yesterday. In case you didn't already see it. I scrolled through that thread
and read the article attached to it. And it looks like, you know, COVID,
maybe gave everyone a lot of perspective. At least that's what it seems like
from reading that article. But really interesting.
Thank you for sending that. The last question I had when I saw the union decline is do people actually want to unionize? There's not a ton of data on this, but public approval of unions right now
is higher than it's been since the 1960s and a nationally representative survey
in 2017 found that 48% of people who were not in a union said
they'd vote for one at their workplace. 48% is here. That's a tough gap to close. But with the pandemic as a catalyst
and the unemployment rate low... unions are having a go at it in 2022. One of the effects of union decline
just means that a lot of people just don't know people in unions
don't know what unions do. So then the effect of these
kind of breakthroughs is that it changes people's consciousness by making those options more realistic
and something that, like, I could actually take a risk
and actually try to win this thing and I might actually have a
decent chance of getting it. So that's everything that I found. It's more complicated than I hoped. But are there any questions
you have about the history or any of that? No, I don't have any questions. It's really—it's been like really exciting to kind of go through this and see
all the work that goes into it. Yeah, it's awesome. We really appreciate
you sending in the question. We're going to use this as like
a pilot episode to try to get more people
to send us questions. So hopefully people will see it
and want to do what you did.
