Explaining the erosion of private-sector unions

https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/private-sector-unions-corporate-legal-erosion/

How corporate practices and legal changes have undercut the ability of workers to organize and bargain

By Lawrence Mishel, Lynn Rhinehart and Lane Windham • November 18, 2020

An increasing volume of research demonstrates that erosion of worker bargaining power and collective bargaining have led to wage suppression and the deterioration of labor’s share of income. At the same time, bold and robust policy proposals to strengthen workers’ bargaining power have risen to a new level of priority for the center-left. President-elect Joe Biden has produced an extensive proposal to strengthen workers’ ability to form unions, and a comprehensive reform of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives.

A full appreciation of the need for comprehensive labor law reform requires an understanding of the serious shortcomings in current law and how they have been exploited over the years by employers resisting efforts by their workers to form unions. Structural weaknesses in the law, exacerbated by anti-union amendments to the NLRA in 1947 and aided by a series of rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and courts, have allowed employers to interfere in and defeat efforts by their workers to organize unions and to face no real consequences for doing so. The full effect of these trends can be seen by analyzing how dramatically new unionization fell in the 1970s—a trajectory from which the labor movement has never recovered.

This paper explains what happened to private-sector unionization in the 1970s by examining data on union elections and workers’ ability to achieve an initial collective bargaining agreement. After showing that a dramatically smaller percentage of workers have been successful at forming a union and winning a first contract, the paper examines the changes in employer anti-union behavior that contributed to this result.

Among its key findings, the paper shows that in the 1950s and 1960s more than 1% of those employed participated in an NLRA election each year. In the 1970s that share fell to 0.78% and in the 1980s to 0.29%. In addition, workers began to lose elections at a higher rate in the 1970s in the face of increased employer resistance. In the 1940s, workers won a union in 80 percent of NLRB representation elections, but by 1977 workers were losing more than half of these elections. And, while 86% of workers who chose a union were able to win a first contract in the 1950s, that share declined to less than 70% in the 1970s. By the 1990s, it was down to 56%. Putting these three pieces together—participation in elections, successful elections, and winning a first contract—we show that while 0.46% of the workforce was able to make it across the unionizing finish line in the 1966–1968 period, only 0.17% of the workforce was able to do so by 1978–1980.

FULL story at link above.