Les Leopold: What is it Going to take the Middle Class from the 1%?

If you truly care about economic justice, then you've got to worry about the precipitous decline of labor unions in the United States. Just take a look at these two charts. The first shows the rise and decline of union membership in the private sector, from the depths of the Great Depression to today. You can clearly see that unions were a big deal from the mid 1930's to the early 1980's. By 1953, more than one out of three American workers were members of private sector unions. That means there was a union member in nearly every family. Through the late 1950's and 1960's, the percentage of union members declined, but the absolute number continued to increase, peaking at nearly 21million members in 1979, largely due to the influx of public sector workers, during the 1960's and the 70's. Then the decline accelerated, as the share of union members fell by half between the mid 1970's and the early 1990's. If we include public employee union members, the current rate is 11.3 percent. The second chart traces the share of our national income, grabbed by the top one percent of US households. It's basically the inverse of the unionization chart. When unions were at their strongest, inequality was the lowest. In 1928, the top one percent hauled off 23.94 percent of all US income. As unions grew, the income share for the richest dropped to less than 10%. As unions declined, the income share going to the wealthiest shot back up to 1928 levels. It's not a coincidence. When unions are strong, they bargain for higher wages and benefits. At the same time, non union employers increase wages and benefits to attract qualified workers, and prevent unions from coming in. Also, unions work for legislation that benefits middle and low income people, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, progressive taxation, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc. Overall, those efforts shift income from the top to the middle and bottom of the income ladder. While working with the labor movement over the past 35 years, I have heard myriad explanations for the decline: Unions are not democratic enough, they don't know how to organize the community, they are victims of globalization, they are too bureaucratic, they don't work hard enough in politics, they don't embrace young people and minorities, and so on. While many of these problems are real, I don't believe they explain what's really going on, namely that unions and the rest of us, are on the losing side of a gigantic class war!