Taking the union pulse

Overall, says Ayre, wages for Oregon workers have been rising faster than inflation, though most of the wage growth has been at the high end and low end. Meanwhile, Oregon’s unemployment rate has dropped a lot, from 8.5 percent in mid-2003, the highest in the nation, to 5.1 percent now — about the middle among states.

But union membership, Ayre said, is flat. As of 2004, Oregon union membership stood at 223,500. That number is almost identical to 1983, when Oregon had 223,000 union members. Thus, unions represent a smaller share of Oregon’s workforce — from 26 percent in 1983 to 15 percent today.

And the composition of the labor movement has changed, Ayre said, tracking the decline of manufacturing and extractive industry employment. Today, Oregon’s public-sector union members outnumber private sector 115,000 to 109,000. Close to 46 percent of Oregon’s public workers are union, compared to 8.1 percent of private-sector workers.

In most occupations, union members earn more on average than their nonunion counterparts. And the real union difference continues to be in benefits, where the defined benefit pension plan and employer-paid full-family health coverage are still the union standard, even as they become rare in nonunion workplaces.

“The union movement is about building power for working people,” says the AFL-CIO’s Chamberlain. “Workers join a union to get better wages and health care. One worker standing alone can’t do it.”

At one time, when unions represented a much bigger slice of certain industries, and workers by custom had the right to strike, union power was chiefly economic. Today, it’s chiefly political: Unions have come to focus limited resources on the democratic process to try to level the playing field when they face powerful employers.

Professor Bussel says unions are much more political today than they were 30 years ago. Three things have happened: The Republican Party became more anti-union. The union movement became more political. And finally, the Democratic Party began to take labor movement more seriously.

“In the mid-1970s, there were easily a dozen Republican U.S. senators who had 80 percent or better union voting records,” Bussel said, “including five or six 100 percent.” You can’t find anything like that today. “The union movement tries to look at both sides, but in reality, it’s harder and harder to support Republicans”

Now, after feeling ignored by Democrats, Bussel and Chamberlain say labor may be coming into a political moment in the sun.

“All the Democratic presidential candidates have spoken much more openly about unions than any set that I can remember going back 30 years,” says Bussel.

“The Democratic Party is waking up to how important organized labor is,” adds Chamberlain. “I can’t remember a time in recent history where you had seven Democratic Party presidential candidates all saying the ‘U’ word.”