Creamer expects the coming election to usher in another parallel to the New Deal era: pro-labor Democrats taking control of the White House and Congress because of the pandemic and the historic economic crisis.
“Those two factors could collide to bring together a renaissance of growth of labor union representation in the United States over the next decade,” he said.
Union membership rates began to grow rapidly toward the end of the Great Depression and after passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, jumping from 7.6 percent of workers in 1934 to 15.1 percent in 1937. It peaked in 1954, when 34.8 percent of all wage and salary workers were represented. The numbers have decreased since the 1970s, falling to 10.3 percent in 2019, and only 6.2 percent of private sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Automation, offshoring, outsourcing and state right-to-work laws contributed to the decline. Academics at Harvard University found that union membership drops by 5 percent to 10 percent in states that enact right-to-work statutes, which allow employees covered by union contracts to skip out on paying membership dues.
Some unions had been bucking downward trends in recent years. A wave of teacher strikes in 2018 led to pay increases in Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Virginia and West Virginia. Unite Here added more than 60,000 members in the five years before 2020. But then the pandemic forced the hospitality industry to close overnight.
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September 17, 2020 at 04:32PM
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Unions eye long term as pandemic weighs on members - Roll Call
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