Anyone who wants to understand why unions are losing membership and public sympathy need only look at the 2018-19 internal budget of the AFL-CIO. It lists more than $40 million in planned spending for “political, electoral and issue mobilization,” which is more than eight times as much as the $5 million allocated for actual union organizing.
Union members probably do not approve, and when word of this budget gets out, neither may the general public. It seems reasonable that when unions stand, without violence, for reasonable worker compensation and working conditions, the public will be more sympathetic than it will if unions are seen as just another partisan, political rent seeker. And it makes sense that when workers see their dues used for politicking that they may not even agree with, they might not want to join or remain members of a union.
Sure enough, as reported in the Washington Examiner news section, the AFL-CIO’s membership has dropped from 14 million in 2005 to 12.4 million today. As a proportion of the work force, overall union membership has dropped from 12.4% to 10.5%. That statistic continues a long, long downward trend from unions’ status in the 1940s and ’50s, when nearly 30% of American workers were unionized.
In the private sector, where unions don’t amount to an effective monopoly like they do among government employees, the union collapse has been even more precipitous, from 16.8% of the workforce in 1983 to just 6.4% now. And, irony of ironies, the AFL-CIO itself was subject to a labor protest last October when nearly 1,000 of its own employees demonstrated outside of the federation’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, asking for better treatment.
But back to the AFL-CIO budget. Many workers have chafed for years at the politicization of the unions. That’s what led to the court case back in 1988 called Communication Workers v. Beck. There, the Supreme Court rightly ruled that workers forced to pay collective-bargaining fees to unions even if they aren’t union members do at least have the right to withhold the portion of fees paid for lobbying and politics.
For public-sector unions, even the assessment of those fees to nonunion members was made voluntary in 2018 in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Because of Janus and other trends, the AFL-CIO itself anticipated a loss in 2018-19 of nearly another 700,000 members.
Maybe the unions should learn something. Maybe if they spent more effort in direct help for their members rather than on left-wing politics, they might earn more approval, more loyalty and, yes, more members.
Just a thought.
