Overall Union Membership Notches Up from 2010 to 2011
Overall union membership increased by 49,000 from 2010 to 2011, including 15,000 new 16- to 24-year-old members, according to new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data out this morning. An increase of 110,000 in the private sector was partially offset by a decline of 61,000 in the public sector, making the rate of union membership essentially unchanged at 11.8 percent, with some 14.8 million U.S. workers union members.
Public-sector density increased from 36.2 percent to 37 percent though November 2011. Private-sector union membership remains at 6.9 percent. The largest increases in union membership were in construction, health care services, retail trade, primary metals and fabricated metal products, hospitals, transportation and warehousing.
Bottom line, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:
Despite an unprecedented volley of partisan political attacks on workers’ rights and the continuing insecurity of our economic crisis, union membership increased slightly last year. Working men and women want to come together and to improve their lives.
50 Years Ago, JFK Opened Door for Federal Employees to Join Unions
Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order opening the door for 2 million federal employees to join unions. His action set the stage for expanding these rights under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter—a bipartisan recognition that federal employees should have a voice on the job.
Executive Order 10988 “might be the least known of the string of significant events that made the 1960s such crucial years in American history,” writes Georgetown University history professor Joseph McCartin—but it contributed to a wave of public-sector unionization that grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975, topping 4 million by the early 1970s.
It’s fitting that on this key anniversary, when we acknowledge the decades-long efforts of public employees to work for passage of laws such as EO 10988, that public employees and workers across Wisconsin have today sent a strong signal that they will never give up the struggle for their rights to bargain collecitvely for a middle-class life.
Read McCartin’s full op-ed here.
June Job Growth Appalling: 18,000
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The nation gained a stunningly small number of jobs in June–18,000–while the U.S. unemployment rate rose from 9.1 percent in May to 9.2 percent last month, according to Department of Labor data released this morning. Analysts had predicted jobs would grow by 100,000 in June. This is the third consecutive month the unemployment rate has worsened and the worst unemployment rate of the year. Hiring by companies, which excludes government agencies, was the weakest since May 2010.
Employment was essentially flat in construction and manufacturing, while health care employment continued to grow (+14,000) as did employment in leisure and hospitality (+34,000).
Some 39,000 jobs were lost in the public sector, and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Josh Bivens points out that the loss of public-sector jobs is a huge obstacle to growth. Nearly all of the 430,000 jobs that have been lost in the public sector during the current recovery have been lost at the local level. Local government employment is now 407,000 lower than it was at the beginning of the recovery, and almost half of those losses have been education workers.
But overall, hiring is “barely happening,” says EPI economist Heidi Shierholz.
Women, Black Workers Hard Hit by Attacks on Public Employees
The improved jobs figures out last Friday obscured the ongoing decline in public-sector jobs. As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics noted when releasing the March unemployment data:
Employment in local government continued to trend down over the month. Local government has lost 416,000 jobs since an employment peak in September 2008.
The loss of such jobs is important because the nation’s well-being depends not only on job numbers increasing, but on the creation of quality jobs—those that pay decent wages and enable people to attain or maintain a middle-class life. According to National Employment Law Project (NELP), the new jobs being created aren’t as good as the ones that have been lost. NELP found that jobs in lower wage industries, such as retail and food preparation, made up 23 percent of the jobs that were lost in the recent recession. Yet they made up 49 percent of the jobs the economy has gained in the past year. As the BBC Business puts it:
In other words, it appears that while people may finally be returning to work, they have to work for less pay.
Target Wall Street Greed, Not Public Employees
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Too often when economic times get tough, scapegoats are found in the wrong places. Wall Street greed and double-dealing sparked much of the nation’s recent near-financial collapse, yet many in the chattering classes instead are attacking public employees for this rolling recession.
Economist Dean Baker puts the situation in perspective:
Fifteen million people are not out of work because of generous public employee pensions. Nor is this the reason that millions of homeowners are underwater in their mortgages and facing the loss of their home. In fact, if we cut all public employee pensions in half tomorrow, it would not create a single job or save anyone’s house. The reason that millions of people are suffering is a combination of Wall Street greed and incredible economic mismanagement.
Marching Across California to Restore the American Dream
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(This is a cross-post from the AFSCME website.)
A massive demonstration at the state Capitol in Sacramento on April 21 heralded the end of the 48-day March for California’s Future, but the marchers’ fight to preserve public services and education has only just begun.
Thousands participated in the 365-mile march, sponsored by AFSCME councils 36 and 57, UDW Homecare Providers Union, the Coalition of LA City Unions, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and other education and civil society groups.
Seven hardy individuals set out to make the entire journey on foot, and six succeeded, including Irene Gonzalez, vice president on the executive board of L.A. County Deputy Probation Officers Local 685 (AFSCME Council 36).
Says Gonzalez, a senior investigator aide and reserve deputy probation officer for Los Angeles County:
Our message of restoring quality public education and public services, rebuilding a government that serves all Californians, and creating a fair tax system to fund our state’s future has found real resonance here in Sacramento and throughout the Central Valley.
Public Sector, Public Good
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In 2008, my local union was approached by librarians in Saugus, Mass. They wanted to form a union. As the only city workers without a union, they were easy targets during budget cuts and hadn’t had a raise in four years. It worked out. But I sure got a taste of the insane ranting against public-sector workers in the newspaper blogs.
“Who’s paying the $70,000 salaries for those union librarians?” demanded one anonymous coward. The librarians had no union at the time. A librarian with a master’s degree made about $19 an hour. With a 35-hour workweek, she was missing about half the salary imagined by anonymous.
Public-sector union members are now the majority of the labor movement, 51.5 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The destruction of private-sector unions leaves public-sector unions naked in the gun sites of the right. Fresh from a brutal New Jersey state Senate session where Communications Workers of America (CWA) state employees were under attack, the CWA District 1 political director mused that the biggest problem we have there is that there are no longer 60,000 union auto assembly workers in New Jersey. None.
Recession’s Lost Wages Cost More than Health Care Reform
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Here’s a stunning fact that points both to the need for Washington lawmakers to rapidly move on massive job creation and pass health care reform:
The wages lost as a result of the 2008-2012 recession will top $1 trillion—more than the estimated 10-year cost of health care reform. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates unemployment at more than 7 percent in 2012.
Last year, in fact, the United States spent $2.3 trillion on health care—$7,681 per person, a far larger per-person cost than in western European nations where everyone actually gets health coverage (unlike the 47 million Americans here who don’t.) Yet opponents of health care reform and foes of a public-sector role in job creation continue to harp on the long-discredited theory that the private sector will come to the rescue of our nation’s ills. As Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), points out:
For conservatives to insist that we now rely only on the private sector for economic recovery is a bit like Bernie Madoff starting a new mutual fund from prison with the slogan, “Trust me.”
