Baby Boomers and even Gen Xers of a certain vintage may remember a catchy TV jingle, which easily can become an earworm, celebrating the work of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and urging Americans to buy clothing manufactured in America, by American workers.
The ad campaign (youtube.com/ watch?v=J_ wqeP5H_7M) began during the late 1960s, as American textile plants were closing all over the country, losing jobs and contracts to foreign manufacturing facilities in Asia and Latin America. The ads were continually updated and recast, with actual ILGWU members singing the “Look for the Union Label” jingle for nearly a generation.
Numerous retailers later adopted and adapted the “Made in America” logo, too, most notably Walmart, all the while actual union membership began an ongoing period of steep decline.
The U.S. Department of Labor recently released new job and employment numbers for January 2023, as well as adjusted upward the new job numbers for November and December of 2022. The January estimate is north of 550,000 new jobs, with hundreds of thousands of other positions still seeking workers to fill an estimated 10-million job openings nationwide.
Within the private sector, there are roughly 7.2-million union members, representing just about six percent of the 120.36 million people in the privatesector workforce. Leisure and hospitality industry workers lead most of the current growth in union membership.
Although unions did add more members in 2022 than any year since 2008, the percentage of all wage and salary workers who are active union members hit a record low of 10.1 percent. The only unions experiencing consistent growth are within the public sector, as municipal, county, state and federal government workers increasingly belong to unions. Some of this union-membership decline also comes as a result of the continuing U.S. shift away from manufacturing toward service industries.
I have nothing but respect for hard-working Americans, laborers and those on the front lines of almost every industry and workplace, but the way union leadership and political activism has morphed over time, I see less to benefit the member and more benefitting their boards, leadership and even the offices and infrastructure of the unions themselves.
One of the largest unions in Georgia is the Teamsters, which among others represents 340,000 UPS employees. Brown has all of its divisions headquartered in metro Atlanta and its truck drivers and package delivery division dropped off more than 20-million parcels each day last year, second only to the U.S. Postal Service in daily ground deliveries (the USPS is also unionized).
The current UPS-Teamsters contract is up on July 31 this year, with new contract negotiations scheduled to begin in April. The last UPS worker strike in 1997 lasted for 15 days when e-commerce and parcel delivery was only a small fraction of what it is today.
The Teamster’s proposed new contract will seek $20 an hour for even part-time workers and the end of a sometimes- controversial, two-tier wage system, as well as air-conditioning for all UPS delivery trucks and a stop to the use of cameras facing inside the trucks, both in the driver’s cab and the rear storage area of each vehicle.
Of course, a substantial, universal wage and shipping rates hike likely will mean a higher price paid for Amazon Prime and fewer free-shipping offers from many of the merchants that consumers like you and I have come to rely on during the economic shift from retail to e-tail, exacerbated by the pandemic.
However, as frequently as negotiators lead their discussions with wage-gap differences between the hourly rates of front-line workers and the company C-suite, just try and gain access to the salaries and comp packages of union leaders themselves. From your local union shop steward to national presidents, you will find a good bit more translucence than transparency in those comp packages.
Not surprisingly, union members are increasingly aware of these discrepancies, too.
In an age with OSHA, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, state and federal Departments of Labor, and a raft of state and local ordinances regulating workplace conduct, discrimination, harassment and litigation impacts on wrongful termination, the role of unions has morphed more from watchdog to show dog.
There do remain industries and workplaces where workers need a pit bull in their corner, but many union offices and operations now more often resemble competitors in the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
More inbreeding may result in some additional refinement, but also a lot less bite in the dog.
And in this case, at least among union members, they may not be getting what they think their dues are actually paying for.