“The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that membership in a labor organizations had fallen to it lowest level yet, comprising just 11.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. The number was a modest decline of 0.2 percent from the previous year and continues the movement’s gradual decline over the last few decades. It has dropped nine percentage points from its high of 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year the Labor Department began tracking the number.
The BLS’s data showed that just 6.6 percent of private sector workers now belong to a union, while 35.7 percent of all public sector workers — people employed by the government at some level — are members. Overall, there are 14.6 million people in unions, with the private sector ones only slightly exceeding the public sector ones in total numbers, 7.4 million to 7.2 million.”
One only has to look at Wisconsin (of which we have blogged quite a bit) to see union membership crash once individuals realize “HEY! I have a CHOICE!” and take it. And that choice has been, to the terror of the highly compensated union leadership, to keep their own money in their own pockets and drop out of the unions. Despite all of the union wailings to the contrary, individuals (now having the “free market” to decide) said to themselves “The value does not exist – I am not receiving sufficient value from the union’s offerings” and took a walk. And the doom and gloom that the unions employed did not occur for the public at large (only to and for themselves – something they already foresaw and thus, fought against it so hard).
While many deride the Crony Capitalism that consists between Big Government and Big Government, without that same sense of Cronyism between Big Government and Big Union, there’d hardly be any union at all. It simply has become a victim of itself – by their pushing of their own values into Government as a norm (and then out to the private sector), they’ve made themselves more and more irrelevant as they moved from “union” to “political”.
Doesn’t hurt that they overpriced themselves as well. Or a few other things but this is sufficient for now.
(H/T: Washington Examiner)
