We Want Union

In 2012, American union membership was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for some time: Fifty years ago, the figure was almost 30 percent.

But survey data show that workers’ desire to join unions has been growing since the 1980s, and a majority of nonunion workers would now vote for union representation if given the opportunity. As for those right-wing claims that unionized workers don’t like their unions, the same polling shows that 90 percent of existing union members would vote for their union if given the chance to vote to keep it or get rid of it

 The gap between what workers want and obtain in representation is greater in the United States than in any other advanced English-speaking country. About one-half the nonunion workforce in the United States desires union representation but does not have it, a union representation gap far larger than the roughly 25% to 35% gap in the other countries. workers see a major gap between the representation and participation they want at the workplace and what they have; the largest proportion ever recorded in survey data express a desire for union representation. Many workers also desire workplace committees that meet and discuss issues with management, some as a supplement to collective bargaining and some as useful even without collective bargaining.

 The main finding of the survey was that the vast majority of workers—85% to  90%, depending on the particular questions—wanted a greater collective say at the workplace than they had.

The proportion of workers who want unions has risen substantially over the last 10 years, and a majority of nonunion workers in 2005 would vote for union representation if they could. This is up from the roughly 30% who would vote for representation in the mid-1980s, and the 32% to 39% in the mid-1990s, depending on the survey. Given that nearly all union workers (90%) desire union representation, the mid-1990s analysis suggested that if all the workers who wanted union representation could achieve it, then 44% of the workforce would have union representation. The rise in the desire for union representation since then suggests that the share of the nonunion workforce wanting union representation in 2005 was 53%. These results, in turn, suggest that if workers were provided the union representation they desired in 2005, then the overall unionization rate would have been about 58%.

Workers want a workplace-committee form of representation. Three-fourths of workers desire independently elected workplace committees that meet and discuss issues with management, which some see as a supplement to collective bargaining (having both) and some see as useful as a stand-alone mechanism for voice. Very few workers (14%) are satisfied with their current voice at work and seek no changes although another 10% are unsure about what they want.

Workers see management opposition as a major reason for their inability to obtain the workplace representation and participation that they seek. In 2002 58% of Americans thought that big business had too much influence on the Bush Administration compared to 22% who thought they had the right amount and 8 % who thought that big business had too little influence.

From Here