By Kris Warner
Research Assistant, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual summary of unionization in the U.S. It reports that in 2012, the union-membership rate of wage and salary workers was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for some time: Fifty years ago, the figure was almost 30 percent.
It’s conventional wisdom that the post-industrial workforce doesn’t want to be unionized. But survey data show that workers’ desire to join unions has been growing since the 1980s, and a majority of nonunion workers would now vote for union representation if given the opportunity. So if workers want unions, why is unionization falling?
Commentators have also blamed the decline on everything from globalization to technological advances to the hollowing-out of American manufacturing. But those factors are only part of the story.
Canada’s experience offers another answer. Canada has gone through many of the same economic and social changes as the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, yet it hasn’t seen the same precipitous decline in unionization. The unionization rate in the U.S. and Canada followed fairly similar paths from 1920 to the mid-1960s, at which point they began to diverge drastically.
Differences in labor law and public policy are at the root of this disparity.
Union-Friendly
First, Canadian law is simply far more hospitable to unions. Several provinces have bans on temporary or permanent striker replacement, which don’t exist in the U.S. And there is no Canadian equivalent of the “right-to-work” laws that have been enacted in 24 U.S. states, which prohibit unions and employers from requiring employees covered by union contracts to pay for representation.
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Kris Warner holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Political Science and a minor in International Relations from Penn State University. He also has an M.Sc. in Community Economic Development from Southern New Hampshire University, where his thesis was on forming a worker cooperative. He has previously worked as a union organizer for the United Steelworkers union.
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This has been reposted from Bloomberg News.
Posted January 24, 2013 at 3:00 pm, in Allied Approaches, From the News
