In the Name of Liberty

For some time now, union membership. has been steadily declining. After reaching a peak of 33 percent in the United States in 1953, unionization hit 10.7 percent in 2016, its lowest level in one hundred years, and it shows no sign of rising. In the UK, union membership is now half of what it was in 1979, or about the level it was just after World War II. In many other liberal capitalist democracies, unionization rates have been falling steadily as well. In part this decline is due to the success that unions have had in establishing a more just baseline for the treatment of all workers, for this makes joining a union seem less necessary for current employees. In part the decline is due to shifts in the nature of the relevant economies, in which large numbers of union jobs in heavy manufacturing have been shifted to less-unionized countries and been replaced by jobs in industries that are more difficult to unionize. In part it is due to local outsourcing of what were high-paying unionized jobs to smaller,exploitive, currently non-unionized contractors who are also more difficult to organize. And in part this decline results from technological advances. that have allowed many previously unionized jobs to be performed by robots. But especially in the US, this decline is also in large part the result of continuous attacks made against the very idea of unionization over the last 30-plus years, attacks which have been increasing in both frequency and vigor for some time now, and which are increasing even further under the administration of president Trump. In any event, regardless of the cause of this decline, unionization membership is now becoming sufficiently small that unions may soon lose their ability to adequately protect workers from economic and personal abuse (if they haven't already), and may even lose their significance as a political force--