Labor Unions in the United States

I

INTRODUCTION

Labor Unions in the United States, the various labor organizations in the United States, each of which serves to consolidate, represent, and protect the rights of workers in a specific industry or trade.

II

PRE-CIVIL WAR ERA

The trade union movement in the United States originated during the early years of the republic. As in other countries, skilled workers were the first to organize and form unions. During the 1790s unions were formed by the carpenters and shoemakers of Philadelphia, the tailors of Baltimore, Maryland, the printers of New York City, and groups of crafts workers in other large cities. These unions, usually small, were organized to conduct particular strikes, after which they were dissolved. Actions in the 18th century were few, although journeyman printers did occasionally strike in New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1700s. Sporadic work stoppages also occurred during the early decades of the 19th century, although strike leaders frequently were fined and imprisoned for what was termed “conspiracy to raise wages.”

In 1827 several trade unions in Philadelphia banded together to form the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations, the first U.S. labor organization to unite workers in different crafts. Other cities soon had similar local federations. Besides acting to raise wages and improve working conditions, the federations espoused certain social reforms, such as the institution of free public education, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, and the adoption of universal manhood suffrage. Perhaps the most important effect of these early unions was their introduction of political action.

The first nationwide federation, the National Trades Union, was founded in 1834, but it was short-lived. Despite additional attempts to confederate during the next few years, the economic crisis of 1837 and the ensuing depression led to a sharp decline in union membership, halting the movement temporarily.

Unions resumed their growth after the revival of business in the 1840s and early '50s. Organization was stimulated by the decision of a Massachusetts court (Commonwealth v. Hunt, 1842) that strikes to improve labor conditions were lawful and were not criminal conspiracies. The growing local unions sought again to combine, but instead of trying to set up a federation like the National Trades Union, they concentrated on forming national unions of workers in the same craft. Among the skilled workers who established such unions were the typographers (organized in 1852), the stonecutters (1853), the hat finishers (1854), the blacksmiths and the machinists (1857), and the iron molders (1859). The economic crisis of 1857 resulted in drastic declines in trade union membership and in the dissolution of several national unions.

Before the American Civil War (1861-1865), many influences conspired to limit the growth of trade unionism. Perhaps most important was the scarcity of large-scale industry in the United States before the war. Most laborers were employed by small firms, in which they generally enjoyed close personal relationships with their employers. What mattered more was that many employees had reasonable hopes of establishing similar businesses of their own someday. The relative absence of barriers between employer and employee minimized class consciousness and class conflict. Furthermore, the existence of an open frontier in the United States meant that any enterprising worker could become a farm proprietor instead. Before the Civil War the United States was predominantly a nation of small proprietors and of those who aspired to this status. It was natural for many workers to share the hostility of small proprietors to trade unionism, and therefore to refrain from organizing.

III

POST-CIVIL WAR GROWTH

The Civil War altered the situation drastically. During and especially after the conflict, the industrialization of the country accelerated. The period was marked by the development of large enterprises employing thousands of workers, most of whom no longer expected to escape their working class status. As a result, unionization advanced rapidly. More than 30 national craft unions were established during the 1860s and early 1870s. Particularly significant was the formation in 1863 of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the first of the railroad brotherhoods (see Railroad Labor Organization).

The National Labor Union (NLU), a federation of national and local unions and of city federations, was founded in 1866. Within two years it had more than 600,000 members. The NLU leadership, however, through immoderate emphasis on political action, alienated many of the constituent unions, whose members regarded only purely economic struggles to be the proper function of labor organizations. The withdrawal of several national unions caused the collapse of the NLU in 1872.

The decade of the 1870s was a period of widespread labor agitation and unrest, largely because of the distress suffered by workers after the disastrous economic crisis of 1873. Numerous unions struck against wage cuts and displacement of workers by laborsaving machinery. Most employers vigorously opposed trade union activity. The resulting struggle between workers and employers often took violent forms. The activities of the Molly Maguires, a secret organization of workers operating lawlessly in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, reached a peak during this period. Labor disputes in other areas were hardly less bitter. In the railroad workers' strike of 1877, federal troops had to be used to restore order. The 1870s were marked also by the steady growth of the Knights of Labor, originally a secret fraternal order but later a so-called inclusive union, that is, one embracing workers in all trades as well as common laborers.

IV

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

A number of trade unions combined in 1881 to form the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada as a means of influencing legislation in behalf of labor. This federation was never very effective, and by 1886 it was in decline, as was the Knights of Labor. In December of that year, delegates from various affiliates of both organizations as well as from certain unaffiliated unions met in Columbus, Ohio, for the purpose of organizing a trade union movement more enduring and effective than any of its predecessors had been. They established the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and elected as its first leader Samuel Gompers, president of the Cigarmakers International Union and of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The initial membership of the AFL was estimated at about 140,000 workers grouped in 25 national unions.

The AFL represented a form of so-called business unionism, a labor philosophy contrasting sharply with the broad-based unionism of the Knights of Labor. Whereas the latter was an integrated organization, the AFL was a loose confederation of autonomous unions, each with exclusive rights to deal with the workers and employers in its own field. The AFL concerned itself primarily with organizing skilled workers. Instead of campaigning for sweeping reform programs such as were advocated by the Knights, the AFL confined itself to the pursuit of specific, attainable goals, such as higher wages and shorter hours. The AFL renounced identification with any political party or movement and adopted instead the policy of urging its members to support candidates for public office, federal, state, and local, considered friendly to labor, regardless of party affiliation, and to vote against those regarded as hostile.

During the 1890s several AFL unions, including those of the printers and of the building trade workers, finally achieved the long-sought goal of the 8-hour day. Nevertheless, the trade union movement grew slowly until the beginning of the 20th century. Prevailing popular sentiment was still hostile to the organization of labor, and both the government and the courts acted to restrain trade union activity. The depression of the early 1890s and several disastrous strikes also stunted union growth. In the historic strike (1892) at the Homestead Mill of the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh, large numbers of private detectives and guards as well as National Guard troops were used against the strikers, with the result that the strike was lost and the union that conducted it virtually destroyed. In 1894 a strike by the American Railway Union against the Pullman Palace Car Company was defeated by an injunction issued under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which made a combination or contract in restraint of trade illegal. Thereafter employers used injunctions with increasing frequency and effectiveness as an antistrike weapon. See also Hours of Labor; Haymarket Square Riot.

V

INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION

The expansion of industrial activity after the Spanish-American War (1898) led to renewed growth of trade unionism. By 1904 more than 2 million workers were members of trade unions. Almost 1.7 million belonged to the AFL. Although most employers remained bitterly hostile to the unions, many industries, including construction, publishing, glass, ceramics, coal, and railroads, began to accept collective bargaining with unions as normal.

In 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which publicly adopted the revolutionary trade union principles of syndicalism, was organized in Chicago. The IWW never had more than about 100,000 members, who were called Wobblies, but it conducted numerous strikes, many marked by bloodshed, and exerted a major influence on the American labor movement until the early 1920s. In the early 20th century, the first female workers became members of unions, notably of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which lasted throughout the century, merging with other unions to become UNITE HERE in the early 21st century.

In the years immediately preceding United States entry into World War I in 1917, organized labor won several important gains from the federal government. In 1913 the U.S. Congress created the Department of Labor, thereby assuring that the needs and problems of labor would receive top-level consideration. The state of Massachusetts enacted (1912) the first minimum-wage law in the Unites States. The Clayton Antitrust Act, passed in 1914, restricted the use of the injunction in labor disputes. In 1916 the independent railroad brotherhoods won a signal victory through the enactment by Congress of the Adamson Eight-Hour Act. Although this law limited the working hours of railroad labor only, its passage strengthened the position of all unions struggling for shorter hours. During World War I representatives of organized labor were given responsible positions in the war production agencies of the government, and the rights of labor gained increasing official recognition. These achievements contributed to a sharp rise in membership. By 1920 trade unions had about 5.1 million members, of whom more than 80 percent were in the AFL.

VI

UNION DEFEATS AND DECLINE

With its victories during this period, however, organized labor experienced several serious defeats. One of the worst setbacks for the trade union movement was the failure of the strike of iron and steel workers in 1919. Despite the fundamental importance of the iron and steel industry in the national economy, no significant effort to organize its workers had been made before 1918, when the AFL set up the National Committee for the Organization of the Iron and Steel Industry. The campaign to organize this industry was remarkably successful; the workers, many of whom worked 12 hours a day and 7 days a week, welcomed the advent of unionism. The iron and steel companies refused to bargain with the union, however, and discharged large numbers of union members. An industry-wide strike was called in September 1919. It involved almost 370,000 workers, one of the largest strikes in U.S. history. Both the intransigency of the employers and the disunity among the strikers, whose ranks were divided by splits between skilled and unskilled workers, between the native-born and the foreign-born, and between various groups of the foreign-born, forced the workers to abandon the strike without winning concessions from the employers. As a result, the iron and steel industry remained an open-shop industry, that is, one in which union membership is not obligatory, for almost two decades.

The trade union movement declined during the 1920s. A major influence in the decline was the severe postwar depression of 1921-1922. Unemployment rose steeply, and so desperate was competition for the available jobs that the unions in many industries were unable to prevent wage reductions and speedup methods, that is, methods by which workers are forced to work faster, or to produce more than they did previously in a certain period of time. Employment in certain industries continued to decline even after the return of general prosperity. The decline caused drastic losses of membership in many unions, including those of the coal miners, metal miners, and garment workers. The garment-trades unions were particularly hard hit also by bitter struggles for power between Communist and anti-Communist elements. The limited outlook of most trade union leaders during this period also weakened the labor movement. Although in 1924 the AFL endorsed the American political leader Robert M. La Follette as the presidential candidate of the League for Progressive Political Action, this move was an exception to the federation's general policy of refusing to endorse candidates. A more serious result of the conservatism of the AFL leadership was that it made no real effort to organize the unskilled and semiskilled workers in the mass production industries; because these industries, which expanded substantially during the 1920s, were not suited to the craft union type of organization, the AFL would have been required to revise fundamentally its principles before embarking on a unionization campaign. The conservative craft-unionist leadership of the AFL was unwilling to consider revision of its principles.

Taking advantage of the weaknesses of American trade unionism, many employers acted vigorously to forestall organization of their employees. Among other measures, they moved their establishments to areas lacking trade union traditions; abrogated existing collective bargaining agreements and refused to conclude new ones; required their employees to sign so-called yellow-dog contracts binding them not to join unions and induced them to join instead company-controlled employee associations; and engaged in paternalistic practices, such as the establishment of health and welfare plans, as a means of making unionism seem less desirable. For these and other reasons, union membership dropped from the peak of 5.1 million reached in 1920 to fewer than 3.5 million in 1929. During the same period membership in company-sponsored employee associations rose from an insignificant number to about 1.5 million.

The cataclysmic economic depression of the 1930s led to a tremendous rise in unemployment and to a corresponding further decline in union membership. The unions, attempting to offset the adverse effects of the depression on wages and working conditions, launched numerous strikes, but few were successful. The widespread use of the injunction by employers contributed to the defeats sustained by labor. In 1932 Congress, coming to the aid of the unions, enacted the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act, which banned yellow-dog contracts and curtailed the use of injunctions far more effectively than had the Clayton Act of 1914. The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act proved to be the forerunner of the large body of prolabor legislation enacted after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932.

VII

GROWTH UNDER THE NEW DEAL

The first of the many laws sponsored by Roosevelt under the New Deal and passed by Congress for the specific purpose of mitigating the effects of the depression and of stimulating the growth of the trade union movement was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 1933. One of the most controversial sections of this law stipulated that “employees shall have the right to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers ... in the designation of such representatives.” Quick to take advantage of this legislative encouragement, the unions carried out successful organizing campaigns in many industries during the ensuing 22 months. Membership in the AFL, which had dropped to about 2.5 million in 1932, rapidly mounted to more than 3 million workers. In May 1935 the Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, but two months later Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which provided even stronger government support for organized labor. The NLRA not only reafffirmed the right of labor to organize freely and to bargain collectively, but also applied the designation “unfair” to certain practices designed by employers to impede unionization and made those found guilty of such practices subject to penalty. One of the most significant provisions of the NLRA made domination or financial support of unions by employers illegal. This virtually eliminated the company-dominated employee associations.

VIII

CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS

In 1935 a group of union leaders within the AFL demanded the revision of craft union principles to facilitate organization of workers in the mass production industries. With the leaders of eight AFL unions, John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America, formed (November 1935) the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) for the purpose of conducting a unionization campaign in the mass production industries. The CIO unions were suspended from the AFL in August 1936 and expelled in May 1938. Six months later, at a constitutional convention held in Pittsburgh, the committee constituted itself a permanent independent federation called the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The new federation comprised 32 international unions and 9 organizing committees. Among the basic manufacturing industries unionized by the CIO were iron and steel, automobile, rubber, electrical and radio, and shipping.

The campaigns to win union recognition in unorganized industries were accompanied by the greatest wave of strikes in American history. Most of the strikes were successful, and some of the largest firms in the country were prevailed upon to negotiate collective bargaining agreements. Particularly effective in gaining its ends was the use by the CIO of the so-called sit-down strike, in which striking workers occupied the plants for the duration of the dispute.

The combination of favorable legislation and dynamic organizing drives resulted in unprecedented growth of union memberships. By 1940 the total number of union members had risen to about 8.5 million. In that year, the second year of World War II, the federal government called on organized labor to assist the national defense program. Labor representatives were appointed to many federal agencies. Soon after December 7, 1941, when the United States entered the war, many unions adopted no-strike pledges in order to further the war effort. In January 1942 Congress established the War Labor Board to adjudicate wartime labor disputes. Although several strikes occurred during the war, the effect on production was comparatively negligible. Unions took advantage, however, of the high rate of employment, the relative scarcity of labor, and the tremendous industrial expansion during the war years to increase their ranks. By 1945 aggregate membership exceeded 14 million.

IX

POSTWAR STRIKES AND POLITICS

After the war, in late 1945 and early 1946, the trade unions renewed their struggles for higher wages and improved working conditions. In the first, largest, and longest postwar strike (November 1945 to March 1946), that of the United Automobile Workers, CIO, against the General Motors Corp., the union made a new type of demand: that the company increase wages without increasing prices. Although the company refused to negotiate on the question of prices, the demand influenced later bargaining, in which unions won contracts containing provisions for automatic wage increases on the basis of rises in the cost of living, as well as for annual automatic wage increases predicated partly on the savings accruing to a company from technological advances.

More strikes than ever before occurred during 1946, and unprecedented numbers of workers were involved. The strikes were generally successful, leading many conservative legislators to denounce the growing power of labor as dangerous to the nation. Of historic importance in the same year was the establishment by the federal government of the Social Security Administration, a significant step in the economic protection of workers. In the following year the Republican majority in Congress secured the enactment, over a presidential veto, of the Labor-Management Relations Act, commonly called the Taft-Hartley Act, embodying a number of provisions designed to curb the power of organized labor. The unions opposed this law vigorously, and in the election campaign of 1948 generally supported the Democratic party and its presidential candidate Harry S. Truman, who had vetoed the law.

For some years prior to 1948, the majority of affiliates of the CIO, with about 5 million members, had been critical of certain pro-Communist policies of some affiliates, with about 1 million members. At the national CIO convention of 1948, the overwhelming majority voted to support not only the domestic program of President Truman but also those aspects of his foreign policy that were designed to contain international communism. The minority, on the other hand, denounced the Truman foreign policy as a manifestation of U.S. imperialism and announced its support of the presidential candidate of the Progressive party, Henry A. Wallace. The majority leadership, accusing the minority of accepting the domination of the Communist party, threatened to expel them from the CIO. The left-wing unions nevertheless persisted in their stand. At the 1949 CIO convention, the largest of the left-wing affiliates, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, which had about 450,000 members, was expelled. In succeeding months the CIO executive board expelled ten other unions after long hearings. In some cases the CIO chartered new international organizations, most notably the International Union of Electrical Workers, to absorb workers who resigned from the left-wing unions.

A new wave of strikes developed in the steel, coal mining, and railroad industries during 1949 and 1950, but determined efforts were made to prevent strikes from crippling the American economy and particularly from hampering the national effort in the Korean War, which began in June 1950. In December 1950 the railroad switchmen called off a nationwide strike after President Truman, speaking as commander in chief of the armed forces, characterized it as a threat to national security. A new crisis arose in February 1951, when the major unions withdrew their representatives from all mobilization agencies, charging that labor interests were being ignored in defense planning. Labor abandoned its boycott of the agencies in April, following establishment by the president of a National Advisory Board on Mobilization Policy, which took a more lenient view of labor's wage demands.

During 1952 the number of workdays lost as a result of work stoppages exceeded the total of every preceding postwar year except 1946. The most serious stoppage, a 53-day strike by the United Steelworkers, CIO, climaxed a series of dramatic developments, including seizure of the steel industry by President Truman and a Supreme Court ruling that his action was unconstitutional. The platform that was adopted by the Democratic National Convention of 1952 strongly advocated repeal of the National Labor Relations Act; the platform advanced by the Republicans called for retaining the act in amended form. Both the CIO and the AFL endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee Adlai E. Stevenson, but the Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected.

In the view of many experts, U.S. organized labor achieved its greatest postwar gain in June 1955, when leading firms in the automobile industry accepted a union-sponsored guaranteed-wage plan under which the workers covered would receive a greater measure of wage payments during periods of unemployment.

X

THE AFL-CIO

Meanwhile the AFL and the CIO, concerned with a climate of opinion much less favorable to labor than that prevailing in the 1930s and 1940s, had moved steadily toward organic unity. The two organizations merged in December 1955 to form the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, thus healing a 20-year breach in the American labor movement. The head of the AFL, George Meany, became the first president of the new organization.

The main problem faced by the AFL-CIO was the elimination of racketeers (individuals who participated in illegal business practices) from trade unions. In January 1956 the AFL-CIO executive committee adopted three ethical practices codes intended to rid the labor movement of racketeers and other unethical union leaders. President David Dubinsky of the ILGWU was appointed head of a committee charged with administering the codes. In January 1957 the Select Committee on Labor and Management Practices was established by the U.S. Senate to conduct investigations of labor racketeering. The committee found evidence of widespread corruption, particularly in the powerful Teamsters Union. Subsequently the AFL-CIO membership expelled the Teamsters Union. The revelations of the Senate committee, however, intensified public hostility toward organized labor and created additional support for state right-to-work laws banning the union-shop agreement and for federal legislation subjecting union finances to public audit.

Despite the effects of the Labor-Management Relations Act and of an unfavorable climate of opinion, the labor movement continued to make substantial gains in membership. Also indicative of the progress of American trade unionism were the benefits won by union labor. Union wage rates reached an unprecedented high level in the late 1950s and, in most industries, were substantially higher than those paid to nonunion labor doing comparable work. The length of the workday had been shortened steadily; collective bargaining agreements stipulating well under 40 hours of work per week had become common. Most collective bargaining agreements made increasingly generous provisions for so-called fringe benefits, including paid holidays, vacations, and sick leave; company-financed insurance, pension, health, and welfare plans; and automatic wage increases that were adjusted to rises in the cost of living.

In addition, organized labor won a significant victory in the elections of November 1958, when so-called right-to-work laws, or proposals to amend state constitutions to permit their passage, were defeated in a number of states, including California, Colorado, Ohio, and Washington. In 1959 Congress passed the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act. The act guaranteed the rights of union members to union meetings, free speech and assembly, and vote by secret ballot at periodic elections for union officers. It also required labor and management organizations and labor consultants to file detailed financial reports of their dealings.

XI

CIVIL RIGHTS IN UNIONS

Although ethnic discrimination has existed for a long time in many trade unions, the problem received only occasional attention until recent years. During the 1960s organized labor, along with most institutions of American society, became caught up in the civil rights movement. Leaders of the black community charged that the member unions of the AFL-CIO deliberately excluded blacks from full union membership, thereby barring them from better-paying jobs. In 1968 predominantly black transit workers in Chicago charged that their union was not responsive to their needs because it was still controlled by retired white workers.

In 1967 Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), resigned as vice president of the AFL-CIO, declaring that it had become “the comfortable, complacent custodian of the status quo.” The UAW then stopped paying dues and was expelled from the AFL-CIO, marking the first major schism in the ranks of the parent union since the expulsion of the Teamsters. After Reuther's death in 1970, the UAW was headed by Leonard Woodcock, who served until 1977; Douglas Fraser, who led it back into the AFL-CIO; and Owen Bieber, who became president in 1983.

The union movement made considerable progress in the late 1960s and the '70s in improving working conditions for migrants. The United Farm Workers (UFW) began to organize some of the migrant farm laborers in California in the mid-1960s. After a 2-year strike, wine-grape growers in California reached a collective bargaining agreement with the UFW in 1967. A major figure in organizing the UFW to unionize farm laborers was César Chávez, who led several successful boycotts and strikes. After a 2-year struggle his organization got 26 table-grape growers to accept union contacts in 1970, effectively organizing 65 percent of that industry. The UFW, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, encountered jurisdictional disputes with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union, which also attempted to organize farm labor. A truce between the Teamsters and the UFW in 1977 lasted only a few years.

XII

DECLINE IN UNION MEMBERSHIP

Depressed economic conditions prevailed from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, and unions experienced a decline in membership, though not in activism. When George Meany retired as leader of the AFL-CIO in 1979, he was succeeded by Lane Kirkland. With its 89 affiliated unions, the AFL-CIO had about 14.1 million members in the late 1980s. In 1995 John J. Sweeney, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was elected president of the AFL-CIO after Kirkland retired. In the preceding decade, many of the nation's largest unions, especially those representing workers in manufacturing industries, had sharp declines in membership. At the same time, nonmanufacturing unions experienced great growth. Among the fastest-growing and most active unions in the last few decades were those representing public employees. In 2006 about 36 percent of government workers were union members, compared with 7 percent of private industry workers. Teachers and social, transit, and sanitation workers have conducted prolonged strikes in many major cities and have made substantial gains. Work stoppages and strikes vary with economic conditions. The main issues are usually wages, working conditions, job security, and union organization.

Although American workers received some of the highest wages in history, organized labor continued to face serious problems. In 2006 unions represented only 12 percent of the workforce. Union leaders blamed the decline in part on the relocation of factories to Southern and Southwestern states, where right-to-work laws make it difficult for unions to organize. They also cited the growing trend of outsourcing, in which employers moved jobs from union shops to nonunion subcontractors or to foreign countries where workers were paid lower wages and lacked union representation. Union leaders also cited the impact of free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that the elimination of tariffs caused the loss of domestic jobs, particularly in manufacturing. Finally, the apparent disinterest in unions among young workers, and the antiunion stance of the Republican Party also contributed to the decline in union membership. The 1981 breakup of the air-traffic controllers’ strike by Republican president Ronald Reagan was a defining moment for the labor movement. Subsequent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board also created more obstacles for unions attempting to organize nonunion workers. By 2007, for example, the United Auto Workers had failed to organize any of the new auto plants opened by Japanese auto companies in the Southern states of Alabama and South Carolina. Similarly, union efforts to organize workers at stores operated by the nation’s largest single employer, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., had failed completely. See also Globalization.

The decline in union membership led to a split in 2005 in the AFL-CIO. The largest union in the federation and the only one with a substantially expanding membership, the 1.8-million-member SEIU, withdrew from the federation and formed a rival Change to Win Coalition. The 1.4-million-member Teamsters Union and the 1.3-million-member United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) joined the SEIU in disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO and embracing the Change to Win Coalition. Leaders of the three unions charged that the AFL-CIO was not doing enough to organize workers. The defections reduced the membership of the AFL-CIO by nearly 25 percent, from 13 million to about 9 million.

One other major union, UNITE HERE, boycotted the AFL-CIO’s 2005 convention and threatened to withdraw. UNITE HERE also joined the Change to Win Coalition, as did the Laborers’ International Union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, and the United Farm Workers of America. AFL-CIO president Sweeney called the split a “tragedy.” Other labor observers, however, noted that the last time there was a major split in the U.S. labor movement—when the Committee of Industrial Organizations left the American Federation of Labor in 1935—total union membership expanded.

In fact, union membership as a percentage of the workforce showed a modest increase in 2007 with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting the first gain since 1983. Union membership rose by 311,000 workers to 15.7 million or 12.1 percent of the total labor force, up from 12 percent in 2006. Public employees continued to make up the largest segment of organized labor with 35.9 percent of public employees belonging to unions. Only 7.5 percent of workers in private industry belonged to unions in 2007. Labor economists debated whether the rise from 12 to 12.1 percent reflected a real gain or if it was just a statistical aberration. Some observers noted that union membership had been expected to decline again in 2007 due to the continuing loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

See also Child Labor; Labor Relations; Women, Employment of.