Decline Of Unions

Leo Troy, a professor in economics at Rutgers University and also one of the country's principal experts on labor unions, says that "Unionism peaked in 1955, the year of the AFL-CIO merger" (Denholm, 1999). The percentage of American workers that had membership in the late 1950's was about 33 percent (Clement 2001). .
             II. Review of Literature.
             Over the last forty years, the role of unions in the United States has dramatically declined. According to the AFL-CIO, growth only occurred in the public sector in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Public sector membership still increases slightly each year, but they, too, are now faced with re-engineering, outsourcing, and downsizing. The reasoning behind this is lower resistance of management (Kleiner, 2001). There has been severe loss in the private sector (Common Sense Economics, 2001). In 1998, there were less than 10% of workers belonging to private sector unions, while 38 percent of public sector employees were in the union. Nonetheless, membership as a whole has dropped to less than 14% of the total American workforce (Denholm, 1999). France is the only country that has a lower percentage of unions to the total workforce than the United States, with a 9 percent membership rate (Longworth, 1997).
             Dramatic changes in economic conditions accounted for the major initial decline in unions. There was a profit crisis, and as a result, the relationship between management and labor began to weaken. The new corporate agenda that began in this era is as follows:.
             -Cut taxes on corporations and the rich.
             -Privatize, downsize, and outsource.
             -Deregulate industries.
             -Enact free trade agreements.
             -Let the Federal Reserve suppress inflation, regardless of cost.
             -Weaken unions and workers" right to organize and have a voice in the political .
             process (Common Sense Economics, 2001).
             With all of this in mind, reasons of why the union actually did and still continues to decline is made somewhat prevalent, but more detail is needed as to why membership has come to the distressing level that it is today.