Union Membership Reaches New Low, Big Labor To Blame

During last year’s rail industry fiasco, liberal reporters’ jaws dropped when I sided with workers and “Scranton Joe” sided with Wall Street.

“I definitely didn’t have Marco Rubio being more pro-worker than Joe Biden on my 2022 bingo card,” tweeted one account.

While Democrats becoming the party of the rich and powerful is certainly news, so too is the fact that railway union bosses sold out their members.

As I said at the time:

“It reveals the out-of-date and out-of-touch nature of our current collective bargaining system.”

New Bureau of Labor statistics make that clear. In 2022 the share of U.S. union membership reached a record low. That happened despite the idea of organized labor being more popular than it has ever been since the 1960s, according to Gallup. No doubt this mismatch is partially the result of anti-union action by Amazon and other companies that have no respect for their workers’ dignity. But a trend that’s continued largely unbroken for seven decades can’t be chalked up to current economic conditions. Rather, it reflects the failures of union leadership and the brokenness of a system that hasn’t been revised since the Great Depression.

Don’t take my word for it – take the word of Jon Hiatt, the former general counsel at the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), who says that union organizers are “blowing [their] opportunity” to capitalize on the growing needs and wants of workers. Or take the word of Director Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, who readily states that “the labor movement [is] organizing the same way they always have” in an economy desperate for change.

Most telling of all, however, is what workers say themselves. Though they are hungry for greater representation, only 35% of potential union members would vote yes to organizing, while a roughly equal 32% would confidently vote no. When pollsters asked those opposed to union formation the reason for their preference, very few respondents cited retaliation by management. Instead, they cited issues like union corruption, member dues, and – above all – politics. That shouldn’t come as a surprise when not a single political issue that the AFL-CIO is involved in receives a majority of workers’ interest.

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