Abstract
The sad particulars about the “House of Labor” in the America of the 1980s are well known: Labor quiescence predominates, and the trade union movement, demoralized and disorganized, has rapidly lost momentum. The number of union members began to decline in 1979 and continued to do so for another decade, representing the greatest sustained loss of unionists since the 1920s. Unions have since lost between 4 1/2 and 5 1/2 million members. The rate of decline of “union density” (i.e., union membership as a percentage of the nonfarm labor force), already visible since 1954, began to steepen around 1979: It averaged about 0.4% per year for the period 1954–1978 but between 1% and 1.25% annually since 1979, more than double the previous rate.1 In the 1950s, unions won about two-thirds of the National Labor Relations Board certification elections held; in the 1960s, almost 60%. Since the late 1970s, however, unions have been winning only about 45% of NLRB certification elections, and during the Reagan years number of such elections declined by about 50% (Moody, 1987). Finally, labor’s strike activity, too, is much lower today than it was even two decades ago, with production time lost to strikes during the mid-1980s reaching an historic low.
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Griffin, L.J., Botsko, C., McCammon, H.J. (1990). The “Unmaking” of a Movement?. In: Hallinan, M.T., Klein, D.M., Glass, J. (eds) Change in Societal Institutions. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0625-2_9
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