State of unions: shrinking

As national labor leaders gather in Hollywood, Fla., for an annual conference, they must explain declining private sector union membership.

By SCOTT BARANCIK, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 26, 2003

Union members may not be on the endangered species list yet. But they're edging closer in Florida.

Only 5.7 percent of the state's 6.7-million wage earners, or fewer than one in 17, paid union dues in 2002, down from 6.3 percent in 2001.

Nationwide, union membership fell to 13.2 percent in 2002, down from a revised 13.4 percent in 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Tuesday.

The data came as top labor leaders from across the country kicked off the AFL-CIO's annual winter conference in Hollywood, Fla.

Asked to explain the union losses in Florida last year, state AFL-CIO president Cynthia Hall pointed to layoffs by major airlines. Many airlines laid off union workers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when both consumer and business travel fell sharply.

Far from a one-time event, however, union affiliation -- and collective wage bargaining on behalf of large groups of workers -- has been declining for decades.

Don Bellante, an economics professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said the national rate of union membership in the private sector has been declining since 1955. Labor Department data show the national rate has fallen steadily at least since 1983, the first year the agency began collecting such data. That year, 20.1 percent of U.S. wage earners belonged to a union, compared to 13.2 percent in 2002.

Florida and other southern states have long had lower union membership rates than most other regions, in part because of "right to work" laws that prohibit unionized workplaces from forcing employees to pay dues.

Another reason is that Florida employment opportunities are skewed toward traditionally nonunion industries, such as tourism, as opposed to manufacturing or mining.

Bruce Nissen, research director at Florida International University's Center for Labor Research and Studies, said Florida and other southern states are historically more resistant to union organizing.

"The entire power system in the south has been structured against unionization," said Nissen, who called unions a democratizing force in society. Efforts to organize the textile and tobacco industries, he argued, "have been been viciously repressed" by institutions from government to the region's newspapers.

Economists were quick to draw a distinction between union membership in government jobs and in the private sector.

Since 1983, union membership among government employees nationwide has increased slightly, rising from 36.7 percent to 37.8 percent in 2002. Over the same period, the private sector rate fell from 16.8 percent to just 8.5 percent.

"Public sector unions are doing just fine," said Barry Hirsch, a former Florida State University economics professor now at Trinity University in San Antonio. One sign: Hall, a former schoolteacher, is the Florida AFL-CIO's first public-sector president.

Hirsch's own calculations of labor department data showed that the public/private gap is even greater in Florida. In 2002, he said, only 2.8 percent of private sector wage earners in the state were union members, versus 24.6 percent of government employees.

Not that public sector workers are immune from change. Neesen, the Florida International Union sociologist, said Gov. Jeb Bush's proposed budget for fiscal years 2003-04 would shrink the state payroll by 2,905 jobs through consolidation and private sector outsourcing. The governor's brother, President Bush, is urging federal agencies to open up as many as 850,000 government jobs to competitive sourcing.

Several economists predicted private sector union membership will continue to fall.

Bellante, the USF professor, said unions are to some extent a victim of their own success. Some have bargained for wages high enough to place them out of contention on the global market.

Trinity's Hirsch said that as the number of private sector unionized workers shrinks, so have their dues, which finance future organizing efforts.

"It will not go to zero," he said of the union membership rate, "but it hasn't hit bottom yet."

-- Scott Barancik can be reached at barancik@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.

Union facts

Details about union membership in the United States:

-- Men are more likely to be union members than women, 15 percent to 11.6 percent

-- Blacks, at 16.9 percent are more likely to be in a union than whites, at 13 percent or Hispanics, at 11.1 percent.

-- Nearly four in 10 government workers are union members, compared to less than one in 10 private-sector workers.

-- The union membership rate for government workers has held steady since 1983.

-- The union membership rate for private industry workers has fallen by nearly half since 1983.

-- Two-fifths of police, firefighters and other protective services jobs are union.

-- The transportation industry is the most unionized in the private sector.

-- Finance, insurance and real estate jobs are the least unionized in the private sector.

-- The most unionized states are New York, 25.3 percent; Hawaii, 24.4 percent; Alaska, 24.3 percent; and Michigan, 21.1 percent.

-- The least unionized states are North Carolina, at 3.2 percent; and South Carolina, at 4.9 percent. They have had the lowest rates each year since 1983.

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