American Union Density in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The key questions for sociologists and others interested in organized labor in the United States are: Why are our unions so weak compared to those elsewhere, and why has their membership fallen from 35 percent of the employed labor force (union density) in 1955 to 14.5 percent in 1997? Across the industrially developed world, union density is much lower in the United States than in any other country except France. But France is not really an outlier. The French do not like to pay dues, hence the low proportion of their workers in unions; but more significantly, unions receive good majorities of the votes in elections to various boards, and most workers are covered by collective bargaining contracts. Such coverage is much less extensive in the United States than in any other economically advanced society. The falloff in union membership here is not unique. With the major exceptions of the Scandinavian countries, Finland, and Canada, union density has declined in almost every industrialized OECD country. Counting each as one unit, union density for 19 nations fell from an average of 46.1 percent in 1980 to 40.1 in 1994. Deleting the four highly unionized Northern countries from the count produces a drop from 39.6 to 30.3 percent. In Canada, union membership grew from the 1960s to the '80s, and moved up slightly from 36 percent in 1980 to 38 in 1997. Density north of the border remains much higher than south of it. These comparative data suggest some other research questions: Why is union density declining across the industrial world (a subject I will not deal with here) and why are unions in Canada, which has an economy similar to that of the United Statesfi so much stronger? Here I have space only to assert a number of assumptions or hypothetical conclusions to the issues I have raised. Unions are weaker in the United States than elsewhere in the developed world for reasons similar to those which may explain why there is no socialism in the United States, to use Sombart's classic 1906 formulation: ( 1) differential value systems: Europe and Canada are more Tory/social democratic, noblesse oblige, statist, and group-oriented, whereas the United States is more competitive, laissezfaire, antistatist, and individualistic; (2) varying social class status systems: Europe and Japan are postfeudal, i.e., more socially explicit and hierarchical, whereas the United States is more egalitarian in Tocquevillian terms, emphasizing equality of respect and meritocracy. Some would add that more union-friendly legal environments exist elsewhere; but while the generalization applies somewhat to Canada, it does not to most other countries, where there are no equivalents of the National Labor Relations Board, and no insistence that employers bargain with unions after they have won representation in elections. If we turn to the Canadian-American differences, a subject I have written about at length, Canada, the Tory outgrowth of the American Revolution, transformed itself in the twentieth century into a social democratic society, with a heavy emphasis on communitarian, statist, redistributionist welfare institutions and policies, reflecting Tory/social democratic values. With these it developed a much stronger labor movement than did its powerfill Whig and classically liberal neighbor, which disdained statism and class organization. Union density has been greater in Canada than in the tJnited States from 1900 to the mid-1930s, and again from the 1960s to the present. The Great Depression and the New Deal period produced an inversion across the border both in union density and welfare policies. The United States became more communitarian and secured a higher rate of union density. To account for these developments briefly is impossible; but