Democrats frequently proclaim that unions are one of the key reasons that we have things like the weekend, the forty-hour week, and the good wages and benefits that prevailed in the 1950s. Hell, I've done that.
They aren't technically wrong. Unions were the tool through which these accomplishment were achieved with negotiations and lobbying overcoming collective action problems faced by employees.
But this is also mildly misleading in a manner that has important policy implications. Unions arise in the first place, and gain power, because the labor market is favorable to employees. Meanwhile, unions suffer legislative defeats, see their share of the work force decline, and are in general, weakened, when the labor market is favorable to employers.
Improvements in workers rights and compensation and treatment flow from how tight the labor market is for those workers, and unions are merely an intermediate step in the process of turning a tight labor market into results.
The private sector unionization rate fell steadily for about 45 years, because factors like automation, offshoring, reduced demand for exports as countries rebuild their manufacturing industries after WWII, and an expanding share of the working age population in the work force contributed to a reduced demand for labor (especially less skilled labor).
A more limited labor supply in greater demand for workers in the last ten years or so, in turn, has seen a reversal of that tend with greater private sector unionization rates.
But this has been mostly in blue states/counties, where service workers have unionized, minimum wages have increased, and other protections for workers have made progress. In red states/counties, which have a glut of less skilled and less educated workers and weak and less productive economies, the downward tend in private sector unionization has continued, minimum wages have been stagnant in nominal terms and declined in inflation adjusted terms, child labor restrictions are being relaxed, and other worker protections have been eroded or flaunted.
Trying to use unions to achieve significant gains for labor in places with weak labor markets isn't a tactic that is likely to produce big results. Unions only produce significant gains for labor when they provide a means by which labor can reap the benefits of a strong labor market.
So, if we want to strengthen the well being of labor, realized through powerful unions, we need to focus on strengthening the labor market, and not primarily on strengthening laws favoring unions which merely help facilitate the realization of the economic power that workers already have in strong labor markets, which only helps at the margins in places that are already primed for worker success.
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