By <a class=”colorbox” href=https://devilatmydoorstep.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/big-labor-conundrum/ “>devilatourdoorstep
Over the past four decades, Big Labor has continued to see its membership shrink drastically as its leaders use the same failed tactics involving forced unionism. The argument that most workers are better off without unions today is supported by the fact that unions now represent approximately 11.3% of the total workforce and 6.6% of the private workforce, a steep fall from their heyday in 1945 when they represented about 35.5% of the workforce. Yet Big Labor has refused to change. Isn’t the definition of insanity, “continuing to do the same thing, but expecting different results?” The inability of Big Labor to generate new organizing strategies or to bring additional value to employees has put unions “between a rock and a hard place,” as succinctly described by pro-labor pundit Jack Rasmus, author of a 4-part essay on the Decline of Labor Unions. Mr. Rasmus’ work is worth reading, both to call attention to labor’s intransigence to make itself relevant to today’s workforce, and to read between the lines for potential strategy changes, if and when labor ever gets its act together.
A sample quote from part one of his essay:
“Had any other movement and its organizations produced so little, for so long, at such a growing financial and other cost to its membership, it would have undertaken a fundamental revision of its basic strategic approach long before now. However, union labor’s efforts to address its failing strategies over the last four decades have been token and tentative at best. Not much has been done to confront, or otherwise challenge and change, labor’s obviously failed strategies of the past four decades—neither at the ‘top’ among its national leadership nor at the ‘local level’ of local union membership. That fundamental strategic discussion is now long overdue.”
Despite its obvious failures, big labor continues, at great cost to its membership and reputation, to engage in ruthless tactics and pursue its own political agenda. It has maintained this course, despite the fact that people are moving away from forced-unionism areas and that membership is declining even in politically favorable locations (see Latest Census Data Show Families Continue to Flee Forced-Unionism States and Even in Liberal Minnesota, Labor Unions Are Losing Members. Big labor continues utilizing its political ties with the current Administration to focus on achieving Card Check, specifically thru rules and regulations recently implemented by President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board, the government agency charged with fairly administering the nation’s labor policy. The following articles outlining new rules and regulations recently handed down by the NLRB at the President’s direction accurately portray the reluctance of the unions to change their business model or otherwise reinvent themselves to serve modern America (see Reinventing America’s Unions for the 21st Century).
UNIONS: Focus now is on new laws, not new members
The NLRB’s New Election Rules: Quickie Elections and ‘The Mount Everest of Regulations’ to Trap…
Federal agencies spend millions …read more