Opinion: Unions Adrift in a Sea of Woes

(Sept. 6) -- On Labor Day, union leaders must ask themselves if the unions' future could possibly be darker.

Of course, union leaders will make their usual speeches about fighting the good fight for working families, but I predict there will be fear and uncertainty in their voices. For they know that America's unions are adrift in a sea of woes, which has become so apparent to me, a professor of labor relations who has taught collective bargaining courses at Clark University for more than 20 years.

Unemployment blues: Unions are feeling the full brunt of massive unemployment. Union jobs are most often found in declining sectors of the economy, and least often in expanding sectors. As employment dwindles, union members are often the first to lose their jobs, whether in the automobile, construction or hospitality industries.

Even when the economy recovers, few new jobs will go to union members. And having fewer members makes unions weak in bargaining because they can't strike with any strength, and organizationally unstable since they rely on members' dues to fund their operations.

Public-sector trouble: The unions once thought they were lucky to have so many members working for the government -- and, indeed, more than one-third of public workers are union members, compared with only one-twelfth of private sector workers. More than half of all union members are public employees.

But most states and cities have to balance budgets, and in this recession they have to cover a huge gap between their revenues and expenditures. They can close this gap only by cutting costs -- drastically reducing the pay and pensions of unionized workers or laying them off in droves.

As a result, public-sector unions, once thought to be all-powerful and immune to economic hard times, are now facing stiff opposition at the bargaining table for the first time. Where it once made good sense politically to befriend the public workers' unions, we're seeing in cities and towns across the country that it now makes good political sense to oppose unions and come out looking like the benevolent protectors of a dwindling government treasury.

Dependence on Washington: The unions are also being hurt by their dependence on the White House and Congress. They helped the Democrats tremendously with door-to-door campaigning and hundreds of millions in contributions. And they expect a lot in return. It's true that after a union-friendly chair was appointed to the National Labor Relations Board (the government agency that oversees union organizing), the bailouts of the auto industry saved the jobs of thousands of union members, and the most recent stimulus bill will save the jobs of teachers, firefighters and police, all heavily unionized groups.

But at the top of the union's wish list is the Employee Free Choice Act -- a bill, stalled in Congress for two years, that would make organizing faster and easier for unions by substituting signed membership cards for secret ballot elections. The union's political allies won't be pushing the EFCA too strongly, but will instead be pointing to its passage as a reward for union support. The unions are staking their futures on promises from Washington.

What to do? We are seeing the worst of times for America's unions. Perhaps unions should experiment with new ways of representing workers, and even sign up and speak for the unemployed and self-employed. Perhaps they should become more independent politically or start their own party for city and state elections. Maybe they should take a gamble and devote all of their energy and financial resources to organizing new members instead of waiting for the law of organizing to be changed.

Labor Day should be a day for debating new directions for unions; however, it's important to recognize the flaws before the fixes can begin. Sadly, what the fiery Labor Day speeches will surely lack is the acknowledgment of, and pledges to address, unions' current flaws, and a strategy to see unions out of these hard times.

Gary Chaison is professor of industrial relations at Clark University's Graduate School of Management in Worcester, Mass., and the author of "Unions in America" (Sage, 2006).