Is Big Labor Losing Muscle Amid Economic Hard Times?

Labor unions staged just 11 major work stoppages throughout the country in 2010, the second mildest spate of such strikes or lockouts in more than 60 years amid one of the toughest job markets in American history.

The Labor Department today said the nearly dozen major work stoppages -- which involve 1,000 or more workers and at least one shift -- idled 45,000 workers for a total of 302,000 lost workdays. Only 2009, with five stoppages idling 13,000 workers, saw fewer instances of major strife between workers and employers in all the years since the government began tracking stoppages in 1947.

Nurses formed a picket line around United Hospital during a strike in St. Paul, Minnesota on Thursday June 10, 2010.

Elizabeth Flores, Minneapolis Star Tribune / MCT

Nurses form a picket line around United Hospital during a strike in St. Paul, Minn., on June 10. Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association launched a one-day strike at 14 hospitals in Minnesota.

The numbers are the latest data to confirm that at a time when a vast corps of unemployed Americans is searching for jobs, organized labor is poorly positioned to demand better compensation or working conditions.

The affected industries ranged from Boeing aircraft workers in Long Beach, Calif., to Longshoremen in New York and New Jersey.

But nearly half the actions involved teachers -- among the hardest hit victims of ailing state and municipal finances -- and nurses, a profession that has remained in demand despite the economic crisis.

If supply and demand is the most dominant economic law determining the leverage unions hold over employers with the threat of a strike, the balance these past three years has overwhelmingly favored the bosses.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, noted in a speech today that on top of the loss of 8.75 million jobs from 2008 through February of last year, the number of Americans of working age increased by 4.4 million during the same period. And though employers created roughly a million new jobs last year, that still didn't keep pace with the number of new people entering the work force then.

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"All in all, we have approximately 6 million more people of working age than we did when the recession began -- and a net loss of 7.7 million jobs," Fisher said. "Divining policies that will encourage the private sector to increase hiring by enough to make up some of this lost ground is both an urgent and a daunting task."

It makes similarly daunting any union defiance of employers, which itself has been waning for decades.

The end-of-the-decade recession may have skewed the average stoppages for the past 10 years, but the average was already down down to 34 per year between 1991 and 2000 from 69 per year between 1981 to 1990 and 261 per year between 1971 to 1980.