Still Wearing the Union Label

A sharp decline in the rolls of organized labor nationally for half a century has leveled off, at least in this region. More than that, we've even seen an increase in unionized labor.

 

 

Judy Ancel looks at the numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor and scratches her head. The director of the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s Institute for Labor Studies sees figures showing a rise in both union membership and union representation locally, but she isn’t sure she’s ready to buy in.

“When these first came out showing that uptick, I was kind of like, ‘Huh?’” Ancel said. So who was right? As it turns out, both were: Amid a decades-long decline in overall union membership in the U.S., Missouri did indeed show more unionized workers in 2011 than it had in 2008, before the worst of the recession set in—from 338,000 unionized workers four years ago to 346,000 today.

But the period between those end points was indeed one of sharp decline, following a burst that pushed union ranks to 361,000 in 2009. One reason for that surge, Ancel suspects, may have been federal stimulus funding as a temporary goose to the economy.

More worrisome, she believes, is the prospect for continuing decline in the numbers of unionized employees at government offices. After all, the share of private-sector workers with union cards has fallen to 7.6 percent, she notes. So the only room for significant reductions has to be on the public side, where there are roughly four unionized workers for every corresponding private-sector job.

The national decline in union membership among public employees took on a new urgency for organized labor last year, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a package of reforms that Gov. Scott Walker implemented to curtail union influence and costs to taxpayers. The state then became a surrogate for the union movement nationally with a recall election against Walker, who overcame millions of dollars in advertising funded by unions nationwide and won with a comfortable margin last summer.

The upshot of Walker’s reforms? Public-sector union membership has fallen sharply in Wisconsin. His success, in a state that has voted Democratic for a genera-tion, inspired similar efforts in other legislative venues, including one in the Missouri House that would have prohibited withholding of public sector employees’ union dues without annual writ-ten authorization every year. That measure failed to clear the chamber. But similar efforts, along with a media spotlight on lucrative public-sector wages and benefits, relative to private-sector counterparts, breathed life into anti-union sentiment in some areas of the nation.

In Kansas City, though, public-sector unions have lower profiles—in terms of membership—than their counterparts nationally. While three of the nation’s 10 largest unions are primarily public-sector, only one of the Top 10 in the Kansas City region is—the Treasury Employees Union’s Chapter 66. Two other unions among the 10 biggest in the region and nation—the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union—include limited numbers of public-sector employees.

Among the reasons for the strength of traditional non-public unions here, some observers suggest, is a demonstrated capacity for high productivity. Ancel says there’s insufficient data to support that long-time regional boast, but Bob Jacobi, director of the Labor-Management Council, believes that quality has tipped decisions by traditional private-sector employers to retain operations here—particularly Ford and GM, with their automotive plants. But there’s something else about the union work force here, he believes.

“Over time, there’s been a fair amount of innovation in terms of labor-management relationships and how workplaces are structured,” Jacobi said. “That’s why this was one of the places that drew Harley Davidson and why Ford was looking at keeping the plant here—there’s a strong union work force open to innovation and improved productivity. What has also helped us is that unions here understand that they want to protect their rights, but also ensure that employers are successful as well.”

When you think back to the 1980s, he said, the first signs of fiscal difficulty at Ford’s Claycomo plant prompted a militant response from union members being asked for concessions. Seeing the
loss of GM’s Leeds plant may have adjusted some attitudes there, “so they looked at changing the way they structured their work flow and relationships between supervisors and stewards, and how the whole process worked in ways that helped increase productivity substantially,” Jacobi said. That was the key to the plant’s surviving.”

The region has benefitted, he said, with two car assembly plants, the Harley plant and some others that have helped keep a declining manufacturing sector relevant.

“Overall,” he said, Kansas City is “somewhere in the middle of major metros in the country. We have a work force that is really outstanding, union and non-union both. Where we have lost union jobs, it’s generally not because unions wouldn’t change or a company said the workers weren’t worth investing in; it has almost always been because of issues of the marketplace or other operational factors.”

 

 

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