yippee Thugarist's bosses can expect a nice pay increase.
Union Membership Decline in US Stops for First Time in 25 Years
MJ wrote:
revol68 wrote:
yippee Thugarist's bosses can expect a nice pay increase.I know, I was hoping we'd get down to like 2 or 3% union membership so the revolution could get started!
I was more thinking it rather irrelevant, afterall northern ireland has the highest level of union membership per capita than the rest of the UK yet it certainly hasn't meant the working class has been more militant.
revol68 wrote:
MJ wrote:
revol68 wrote:
yippee Thugarist's bosses can expect a nice pay increase.I know, I was hoping we'd get down to like 2 or 3% union membership so the revolution could get started!
I was more thinking it rather irrelevant, afterall northern ireland has the highest level of union membership per capita than the rest of the UK yet it certainly hasn't meant the working class has been more militant.
Regardless of whether you think its a good thing, a bad thing or an irrelevant thing... Its still interesting.
I'm not so sure I think one turn around year necessarily means anything, but I will say that SEIU was solely responsable for 25% of the total growth of all unions in the U.S. and at the very least points to a series of organizing growth methodologies that work. AFSCME was solely responsable for 15%. I'm not sure how the rest of the breakdown works but if 2 unions are responsable for 40% of all growth in a country where theres literally thousands of unions... then growth alone certainly doesn't mean anything for the labor movement as a whole.
However, if the growth is potentially meaningful growth of some sort, which means I'd like to see overall growth from 2007 to 2012 really, it would then require some political analysis as to whether growth alone was positive or not and whether growth was also tied to significant worker gains and also built a sustainable infrastructure.
I lloked at some of the trend breakdowns earlier today and it was interesting. Manufacturing is down. Private sector health and education is up (I'd like to see NEA and AFTs numbers), cali had 200k new members alone, the northeast including ny went up, the midwest went down, the south stayed basically stable, etc
Not really a rivalry between public vs private. There's a rivalry between AFSCME a public sector union who think anything public is "their turf" and other unions who think that the public sector should be carved up along appropriate industry lines with the private sector and then the rest of the idiotic unions who'll organize anyone who calls regardless of whether they have any core industrial strength.
There's a general impression in the US that the public sector is innefficient, lazy and incompetent though.
SEIU has a largish public sector division for now. I'm not sure what the numbers breakdown to but we got 1.9 million members. About 1.1 million is healthcare and the rest is the public division and the building services division. The cool thing about this report though is that the private sector actually grew. Not just using public sector growth to pretend unions were successful overall.
navindra wrote:
a large majority of seiu's growth was in the public sector.
Depends on how you look at it. We're beginning to look at parts of the public sector as industrially alligned. So when we take a public homcare unit and use it to leverage the private sector homecare market, the bulk of the numbers might be technically public (sort of depending on whether its an individual provider model or not) but we control the industry in that market. Its not our fault you and Mathias can't figure out how to win dude. 
The simple reality is that in healthcare private and public sector is pretty meaningless at this point. The bulk of the funding is all coming from the public sector. Private sector healthcare is just a money skimming operation.
Hospitals have a good deal of private and insurance money but still are predominantly funded with public dollars, most nursing homes are 100% medicaide funded, assisted living and non-profits might have high proportions of private pay residents but thats not industrially meaningful yet in terms of what we need, homecare is 99% public funded. The only difference between a public homecare worker (usually considered a quasi-independent contractor) and a private homecare worker is that they do the same job but the pubic pays the agency an extra 5 bucks so they can skim it off the top.
There are three basic economic systems in healthcare. Public, private for-profit and private non-profit. The only one of those three that gets a lot of dollars elswhere than the public trough is the non-profits. Unsurprisingly, non-profits are our hardest part of the sector to organize.
Blah blah blah. We grew private sector healthcare in 2007 and you're jealous.
navindra wrote:
public sector union membership grew in absolute terms, but density actually decreased in 2007.
Density in the public sector the way people look at it is meaningless. The public sector needs to be understood along industrial lines. A public sector hospital is in the healthcare industry. Not some manufactured "public industry" or whatever. Unions in the US are inane and have little to no understanding of markets.
Quote:
Density in the public sector the way people look at it is meaningless. The public sector needs to be understood along industrial lines. A public sector hospital is in the healthcare industry. Not some manufactured "public industry" or whatever. Unions in the US are inane and have little to no understanding of markets.
I completely agree with you on this Thug, my own union really needs to stop seeing itself as postal workers because the post office is not an industry in itself and is really just a part of the transportation industry.
In 2007, the number of workers belonging to a union rose by 311,000 to
15.7 million, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported today. Union members accounted for 12.1 percent of employed wage
and salary workers, essentially unchanged from 12.0 percent in 2006.
Full press release here