Introduction
As unions have lost power over the last two decades through much of the industrialized world, workers feel hopeless and the reason they're not organizing isn't complicated. When they are constantly told that the reason they are in this mess is the inevitable march of technology or "because of the market" people become convinced that there's no reason to organize because it won't have any effect. As unions, we're not offering a vision, a plan or a coherent solution that workers think is worth fighting for, and workers won't organize if they don't believe they're going to win. Many researchers have attempted to analyze the reasons for the decline, and the potential paths to renewed union power. This paper considers this literature as a background to analysis of the case of a moderately sized manufacturing union attempting to plot a new set of goals and enact a process of change in the face of sharp membership decline.
The Decline of Union Power
The changing conditions of the 1980s and 1990s undermined the position of organized labor, which now represented a shrinking share of the work force. While more than one-third of employed people belonged to unions in 1945, union membership fell to 24.1 percent of the U.S. work force in 1979 and to 13.9 percent in 1998. Dues increases, continuing union contributions to political campaigns, and union members' diligent voter-turnout efforts kept unions' political power from ebbing as much as their membership. But court decisions and National Labor Relations Board rulings allowing workers to withhold the portion of their union dues used to back, or oppose, political candidates, undercut unions' influence.
Management, feeling the heat of foreign and domestic competition, is today less willing to accede to union demands for higher wages and benefits than in earlier decades. It.......
