LACK OF UNION GROWTH

Labor Force Growth Found Highest in Non-Union Fields

By Paul Jablow

The Sun

(ca. November 16, 1971)

Miami--The United States labor force is growing fastest in exactly those areas that have been most resistant to union organization, the AFL-CIO Executive Council said yesterday.

In its biennial report preceding the federation's national convention, here the council also said that labor would have to increase its efforts in organizing young workers and women.

The council noted that organization over the past two years was concentrated into the two areas that are not governed by the National Labor relations Act or its administering agency, the National Labor Relations Board. These areas are public employees and agricultural workers.

It said that these groups, "without a labor law and a labor board, had their best two union organizational years . . . The private sector, with a law and a board, suffered two of its worst."

The council blamed in part a change of atmosphere on the part of the NLRB and recent appointments to it by President Nixon. "Time alone will reveal the impact of such a weighted antiunion board on union organization," it said.

According to the report, union growth in the "private sector" was 2,000 workers a month, lower than in the previous two-year period. This was the second consecutive two year period to show a decline. Labor also dropped in its percentage of NLRB representation elections won, and unions were also requesting fewer elections than in the previous two-year period.

"The shifts in the national work force," the council said, "disclose that job categories where unions have traditionally demonstrated great organizational effectiveness are growing slowly, or in some cases even shrinking, while the categories expecting the greatest growth are those in which unions have demonstrated the least organizational effectiveness.

"The impact of these radical shifts in the complexion of the work force on union organization has, according to one analyst, cost the union movement nearly 2.5 million nearly from 1947 to 1968 simply by growth occurring where unionism was sparse and contraction occurring where it was widespread," the report said.

The report cited women as an area of "special organizational concern." It quoted a U.S. Labor Department study as saying that the percentage of female workers belonging to unions had dropped from 13.8 per cent to 12.5 per cent since 1958.

While this is the same drop-off as the national average, the report said, women are still coming into the labor force in greater numbers.

The report also quoted Labor department studies showing that from 1968 to 1980, new white-collar jobs would outnumber new blue collar jobs by about 2 1/2 to 1.

It predicted vast increases among service workers, wholesale and retail workers and workers in finance, insurance and real estate in the next decade.

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update 24 July 2008