The case for OSU begins by recognizing that traditional unionism and strategies for advancing it are not succeeding. Seven years after John Sweeney's "new voices" team took over at the AFL-CIO, only 9 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions--a lower proportion than when he took over, indeed lower than a century ago. Unions look healthier in the public sector, but public-sector unionization has natural boundaries on its importance. Public employment is only 15 percent of total employment, and public-sector wage and work norms cannot be maintained indefinitely at sharp odds with the private economy. To give workers greater say in the American economy, unions must increase their power vis-à-vis private employers. This they have failed to do.

The failure is by no means because workers reject unionism. American unions operate under a labor law that is the least favorable to collective worker action in the developed world. They are pummeled daily by a powerful business community uniquely hostile to unions. And for all their PAC giving and get-out-the-votedrives on behalf of Democrats, labor suffers from a party that gets more excited about fighting for free-trade agreements and the interests of high-tech companies than fighting for worker rights.

Admitting all this, however, tells us little about what labor should do. Should it lobby once again for a labor law reform that Congress failed to deliver when unions had a larger share of the work force? Persuade business that labor can be its friend? Reinvent the Democratic Party? Not likely, at least not anytime soon, and almost certainly not without first growing the membership base that could create movement on these fronts. A declining union movement falls into a vicious downward spiral, as lower density reduces resources and ability to reverse the fall. To break the spiral, unions need more bodies and more broad public support.

It seems very unlikely that unions can achieve the necessary scale and recognition through traditional majorities-based organizing alone. Because of work-force growth and steady churning in the job base, unions must organize hundreds of thousands of workers annually merely to maintain their present private-sector density--far more than they currently do. To increase density a percentage point, they need to organize about 1 million per year. To get back to the position they were in when Ronald Reagan took office, they would need to do that for about twelve years running.

A useful rule of thumb puts the cost of acquiring a new union member at $1,000; some estimates are as high as $2,000-$3,000 per new member. So a million new members would cost at least $1 billion, or about 20 percent of unions' annual income. It was on this reckoning that Sweeney, upon taking office, challenged AFL-CIO affiliates to dedicate at least that share of their budgets to organizing. But nobody has seen organizing on the scale of millions of workers since the 1930s, and only a handful of unions have come even close to meeting Sweeney's benchmark. If current trends hold, then, density will continue to decline.

What is needed is a larger transformation in strategy that would change the broader balance of forces in the organizing equation by getting a lot more workers into the labor movement, and spreading labor's influence more widely in society. Labor needs to open itself up. OSU would accomplish that, while complementing the traditional powers that labor still retains.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.