Federal statistics that were released earlier this year show that the percentage of workers in 2012 who belong to unions dropped to the lowest level since World War II.
The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unions lost 400,000 members last year, or about 2.8 percent of their total, and more than half of them were from the public sector. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3 last year, from 11.8 in 2011 — the biggest decline in six years.
But the labor movement ain't dead yet, insists Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America, which came out in 2011.
Burns was in Tampa last weekend to give a speech at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 824 in Tampa. On Friday afternoon, he came by CL's Ybor City offices for a discussion. Here are some excerpts:
CL: Your thesis is that workers' only real bargaining power is their ability to stop production. And to do this, workers must act as a class. Is that correct?
Joe Burns: If you look back through labor history, it was universally understood that without a strike it was impossible to have real collective bargaining. So for the first 150 years of trade unionism in this country the strike was the essence of union power, as one economist said.
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 1, 2013.