Salt of the Earth: Union membership declines in 2000

Social justice news
March 2001

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Union membership declines in 2000

Union membership declines in 2000 . . .
. . . and Human Rights Watch may know why
While 1999 was a positive year for United States union representation, 2000 saw a slight but significant reversal of organized labor's fortunes. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of wage and salary workers who are union members fell from 13.9 percent in 1999 to 13.5 percent in 2000—the lowest percentage in 60 years. The total number of union members, 16.3 million, also fell by 200,000 from its 1999 level.

Both these declines mark a departure from 1999's rosier statistics, which showed an increase of 265,000 union members—the largest increase in 20 years and one that was made up substantially of workers forming new unions—a rise in total union membership of .27 million, and a steadying of the percentage of workers belonging to unions. In particular, membership among private sector workers fell to 9 percent in 2000 from 9.4 percent in 1999, when increases in membership ended a two-decade decline.

But behind these statistics, says Tom Woodruff, organizing director of the AFL-CIO-affiliated Service Employees International Union, "the real story is the millions of workers who were denied the right to choose a union because of employer intimidation."

An international perspective on how the U.S. as a whole measures up to international labor standards come from Human Rights Watch, an organization dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world. The report asserts that "both historical experience and a review of current conditions around the world indicate that strong, independent, democratic trade unions are vital for societies where human rights are respected. Human rights cannot flourish where workers' rights are not enforced.

"Researching workers' exercise of these rights in different industries, occupations, and regions of the United States," the report continues, "Human Rights Watch found that freedom of association is a right under severe, often buckling pressure when workers in the United States try to exercise it."

Private employers are the main culprits when it comes to abuses of the freedom of association in the context of the right to organize and bargain collectively. These employers can and do use a variety legal means to deter workers' exercise of their rights. Some employers drag out legal proceedings for years, fearing little more than an order to post a notice in the workplace promising not to repeat unlawful conduct or grant back pay to a worker fired for organizing.

Many employees have come to view remedies like back pay for workers fired because of union activity as a routine cost of doing business. "As a result," HRW says, "a culture of near-impunity has taken shape in much of U.S. labor law and practice."

While U.S. workers, unlike employees in many other countries, may not suffer from direct government repression, "workers' freedom of association is under sustained attack in the United States, and the government is often failing its responsibility under international human rights standards to deter such attacks and protect workers' rights," the HRW report says.

"Some provisions of U.S. law openly conflict with international norms and create formidable legal obstacles to the exercise of freedom of association. Millions of workers"—including agricultural and domestic service workers—"are expressly barred from the law's protection of the right to organize.

"U.S. legal doctrine allowing employers to permanently replace workers who exercise the right to strike effectively nullifies the right. Mutual support among workers and unions recognized in most of the world as legitimate expressions of solidarity is harshly proscribed under U.S. law as illegal secondary boycotts. Labor laws have failed to keep pace with changes in the economy and new forms of employment relationships creating millions of part-time, temporary, subcontracted, and otherwise 'atypical' or 'contingent' workers whose exercise of the right to freedom of association is frustrated by the law's inadequacy."

And, as the report states, the reality of National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) enforcement falls far short of its goals. Many workers who try to form and join trade unions to bargain with their employers are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported, or otherwise victimized in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association. "But international human rights law makes governments responsible for protecting vulnerable persons and groups from patterns of abuse by private actors. In the United States, labor law enforcement efforts often fail to deter unlawful conduct.

The NLRA defends the rights of workers to form, join, or assist in organizing a union at one's place of employment, to engage in activities that seek to modify wages or working conditions, or to refuse to do any or all of these things. It prohibits employers from unduly interfering in organizing activity, such as threatening to fire or actually firing employees because they are engaged in organizing, and it also protects employees against union pressure on and retaliations against workers who do not participate in or who criticize union activities.

"In recent months," the HRW report concludes, the "U.S. government has amplified calls for integrating human rights and labor rights into the global trade and investment system in such venues as the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Freedom of association is the first such right cited in calls for labor rights in trade agreements. But to give effective leadership to this cause that is not undercut by hypocrisy, the United States must confront and begin to solve its own failings when it comes to workers' rights."

As for government's enforcement role in the U.S., some hope exists for enforcement of unfair labor practice and union representation cases pending on appeal before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency established to enforce the NLRA. In mid-January the NLRB announced it has adopted a new policy to process in a more timely way cases pending on appeal before the board. The new policy establishes deadlines for reaching majority opinions; if the board does not meet a deadline in a particular case, its executive secretary will issue a majority decision.

The NLRB also said it has substantially reduced the number of old unfair labor practice and union representation cases pending on appeal by issuing decisions in 95 percent of the 424 oldest cases targeted in 1999 and 2000. During that same period, it reduced its overall inventory of pending cases by about 16 percent.—Joel Schorn
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