Labor’s Pain

Unions have been staggered by many blows.

If George W. Bush is a "union buster," as we assert on our cover this month, then he follows in the footsteps of many business leaders, and many Republican politicians, who have fought the labor movement over the course of generations.

Campaigns against organized labor have taken their toll. So has competition from abroad, as liberalized trade policies have brought the products of lower-cost foreign labor to capture the dollars of American consumers. Perhaps the very successes of powerful unions in an earlier time also have come to haunt the labor movement, as witness the decline of U.S. automobile manufacturing companies saddled with huge pension and health care costs for their retirees.

The causes may be many, but the effect is starkly captured in a single statistic: The proportion of the labor force represented by unions has declined from a quarter of the workforce 30 years ago to an eighth today.

Private sector unions are especially weak, representing only 8 percent of the workforce, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As their fortunes have ebbed, so too have those of a Democratic Party that's been highly dependent on labor money and organizational heft for many years.

Public sector unions countered the trend-with membership running at 36.4 percent, or more than four times the rate of the private sector. Local government is the most highly unionized, at 41.3 percent.

Union membership among federal employees now stands at 30 percent. And their collective bargaining agreements cover 35 percent of the workforce. By comparison with their private sector brethren, the unions have little power. They cannot bargain for wages, nor can they strike. So they are left negotiating largely about working conditions and employment practices.

With tensions running high about domestic security, unions can provide a check on unreasonable management demands, as Shawn Zeller's story demonstrates. Requiring people to wear body armor, or to be exposed to pepper spray, or to wear black socks instead of blue might cross into the realm of the unreasonable. And it's in these kinds of security settings that Bush and his team have been seeking to bust unions' power. Leading up to enactment of laws establishing new civil service rules at the Defense and Homeland Security departments, and in regulations to implement those laws, the administration has argued that security considerations dictate that management simply must have broad powers to safeguard the American people.

Of course, federal unions are fighting these initiatives and will surely also resist administration proposals to extend them across domestic agencies. But they seem to be gradually losing what strength they have enjoyed, and thus are joining their private sector counterparts in the general decline of labor's power in our economy.

In the short term, resolution of these arguments might have some bearing on our national security. But in the longer run, a more thorough and empathetic engagement with the rest of the world will matter more. Katherine McIntire Peters' interesting look at the government's struggle to teach U.S. operatives the foreign languages needed to protect our interests makes that very point-by concluding that the problem will not truly be addressed until we do a better job in America's public schools.