Right on time for Labor Day, the University of California has some good news for the labor movement: membership is slowly but surely bumping up. According to "The State of the Unions" series, union density stands at 12.6% of the labor force, up from 12.1% last year and 12.0% the year before that. Following a long, long trend of falling union density, these are historic numbers, and cause for celebration on Labor Day.
Now, these simple facts can obscure some important details under the surface. A good deal of the growth is due to organizing in the public sector, as well as rising unemployment among non-unionized workers. Furthermore, organizing a group of workers is not the end goal, but rather the first step on a road to a more equitable workplace. So in addition to being happy about higher unionization rates, we should also be concerned about the quality fo the contracts that unionized workers are getting, and the degree to which those workers have a say in their working conditions, terms of employment, and so on. More than that, there are still a lot of open challenges left for the labor movement to address: the movement is aging, and has not yet figured out how to organize the large, community-minded Millenial generation; new technologies are transforming the economy, and unions must find a way to organize green-collar, biotechnology, and computer technology workers; massive immigration is changing the face of the country, but unionization rates are a bit lower among foreign-born workers than they are among US-born workers. To be sure, in some areas the labor movement has already begun to address these issues. Efforts like the Blue/Green Alliance, Qvisory, the Freelancers' Alliance, and the political alliance between labor unions and immigrant rights groups, are all important initiatives to address these challenges.
So while we should enjoy Labor Day and the good news reported by the State of the Unions study, we should be mindful of the challenges ahead. The labor movement is growing, but we need to work harder to address some of the deep problems in our economy.
