Labor Unions in the US
Labor unions are important institutions that champion the rights of workers in the country. The status of union membership has evolved from volatile and unpredictable cycles of violence ant decline, they have in the past decades grown into collective bargaining platforms for workers. Compared to other countries, labor unions are less powerful due to continued oppression of workers’ rights by states and lack of federal legislation across the 19th century. Collective bargaining was also demonized in criminal conspiracy theories that were fundamentally anti-union (Compa, 2014). Worker’s rights were violated with anti-labor state courts rampantly jailing union leaders and prohibiting strikes across the country on allegations of violence despite lack of evidence (Silverman, n.d.).
The 20th century saw the enactment of federal laws such as the 1926 Railway labor Act with the aim of preventing labor conflicts by establishing an elaborate bargaining system and the National Mediation Board (Compa, 2014). This was followed by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act which covered the airline and railway private sectors. Despite a series of legislations, union membership has been on a decline from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.3% of wage and salary workers at the end of 2019 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). This was a 0.2% decline from 10.5% union membership in 2018 and the lowest membership since the 1980s.
Figure 1: ATLAS, DATA: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020), Rate of union membership, 1984-2018. Rate of union membership among US workers. (2019, February 4). Atlas. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.toc.htm
In the private sector, the decline has been steeper with just 6.2% of unionized workers compared to 16.80% in 1983. Membership in the public workforce such as teachers has however remained solid despite a 3.4% drop from 37% in 1983 to 33.6% in 2019. Despite having never been a union member, labor unions would still be an effective platform to address worker’s rights and freedom from discrimination irrespective of gender, religion, sex age, race, color, sexual orientation, or genetic information. Amidst the current national fight against racism, labor unions remain key in the enforcement of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act that protects workers from any kind of discrimination (The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s, n.d.).
References
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2020). Union Membership. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.toc.htm
Compa, L. (2014). Union Members Summary. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (n.d.). Overview | U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.eeoc.gov/overview
Silverman. (n.d.). How Labor Unions Work | HowStuffWorks. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://money.howstuffworks.com/labor-union.htm
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (n.d.). Overview | U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.eeoc.gov/overview