Union membership has hit levels not seen since the 1930's - a 70-year decline from numbers boasted just last year. The head thugs have differing takes on the news:
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the new figures were sobering.
"Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today's figures on union membership demonstrate," Trumka said. "Union membership impacts every other economic outcome that matters to all workers — falling wages, rising health care costs, home foreclosures, the loss of manufacturing jobs and disappearing retirement benefits."
Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, who heads the 1.4 million member union, said unions still have a future.
"It was collective bargaining that helped bring back the auto industry. It was unions that led the effort on the ground to re-elect President Obama. The labor movement has had its ups and downs over the past 150 years, but I'm seeing a new energy in our union," he said.
But it's hard to argue with solid numbers, no matter how optimistic the thugs try to sound:
Union membership fell to 11.3% of wage and salary workers last year, down from 11.8% the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said today. In 1981, 20.1% of wage and salary workers were unionized.
There's a reason for that, and it isn't the reason offered up by the thug bosses:
“This is part of this fight that we’ve been seeing where business and political allies of business are continuing to go after the rights of Americans to join unions,” said William Spriggs, chief economist of the AFL-CIO, after looking at the numbers.
The public sector is the last stronghold of the union movement, which may be why it is a target of conservative leaders eager to cut costs in budget negotiations. About 36% of the public sector is unionized, compared to 6.6% of the private sector.
No, Billy, there are other factors at work, and a grand conspiracy isn't among them. First and foremost, people have increasingly come to see you as the thugs that you are - and they don't want anything to do with you if they can avoid it. If you ever represented union "brothers and sisters" (or is that "brethern and cistern"?), you stopped doing that long ago.
The president of Michigan’s largest union is instructing officials to prepare to sue its own members, according to a leaked memo issued after the state adopted right-to-work laws in December.
Steven Cook, president of the Michigan Education Association, circulated an email to local unions officials and staff instructing them to monitor revenue streams in light of the right-to-work laws, which are set to go into effect on March 27, 2013.
But Steven - wait a minute - we thought it was all For The Children™! You mean you're wlling to sue the poor, defenseless teachers whom you so courageously represent if they don't pay a hundred dollars a month to you?
Perhaps Jimmy Hoffa hit unintentionally upon a couple of key issues that explain the decline: his union led the effort to keep grifters, thugs, and other Democrats in office. And most people know that his unions precipitated the downfall of the American auto industry in the first place.