Page 18 - Freedom in the world_Neat

workers. In case after case, the NLRB gave management more latitude to abrogate union
contracts, dismiss workers, and discipline union activists.

The political changes spurred corporations to take a tougher line in negotiations with
existing unions and to resist further unionization even more forcefully. This resulted in an
increase in the number of union activists fired during organizing campaigns, an increased
use of fear tactics to discourage unionization efforts, and an increased resort to stalling
tactics to thwart agreement on contracts. Another new wrinkle in labor-management
relations was the replacement of striking workers by nonunion workers on a permanent
basis. Striker replacement, though legal, had seldom been seen in the postwar era. Its
reappearance had the effect of nullifying the strike as a significant weapon in labor
relations.

The willingness of corporations to fire striking workers, including some corporations with
histories of friendly relations with unions, had a powerful effect on organizing and
collective bargaining. Even though only a relatively small number of companies took this
extreme step, the threat that other businesses might follow suit discouraged workers from
striking. The impact of the corporate world's antiunion tactics can be observed in Bureau
of Labor Statistics figures, which indicated that among companies with over 1,000
workers, the average annual number of strikes during the 1980s was 80 (only 45 in
1990). By contrast, in the previous three decades, the lowest number of strikes in one year
was 181, in 1963; the highest, 437, came in 1953.4

The loss of the strike as an instrument in labor-management relations, changes in the
political atmosphere, employers' resistance to unions, a shift in attitude at the NLRB--all of
these factors contributed to a steady weakening of labor's ability to represent workers
effectively in the private sector. In 2006, only 12 percent of American workers were
represented by unions, a remarkably low figure for a developed democracy. An even more
telling statistic is the unionization figure for the private sector: 7.4 percent (by contrast,
36.2 percent of public employees were unionized). Furthermore, the trajectory has
continued downward even as unions have adopted a number of new organizing strategies
and campaigns and have greatly increased the resources devoted to organizing workers in
areas where unionization rates have historically been low.5

American union representation is well below that of practically every other developed
democracy. In Canada, the proportion of union representation is close to 30 percent; for
Germany, it is 22 percent; for the European Union as a whole, it is a little over 26 percent.
But it should be noted that in almost every developed country, union membership has
decreased over roughly the same period as America's trade-union decline, sometimes by
greater margins than in the United States. Between 1970 and 2003, union membership as
a percentage of the workforce dropped by 11.1 percentage points in the United States.
The decline in Australia over a similar period was 27.3; for Japan, 15.4; for Germany, 9.5;
for France, 11.4; for Great Britain, 15.5; and for the European Union as a whole, 11.5
percentage points, about the same as America's.6

Yet even within the context of a global decline in union strength, the American situation is
unique. Although the governments of some developed countries--Great Britain and

Page 18 of 168