The End of the Decade of the Public Sector

posted at 5:44 pm on January 24, 2011 by Mike Antonucci
[ Education ]   

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its annual dose of bad news on union membership. While 2010 was a bad year for everyone, it was a particularly bad year for unions.

There were 612,000 fewer union members in 2010 than there were in 2009 (which itself had a 770,000 member decline from 2008). To put that into some perspective, the entire economy lost only 417,000 jobs in 2010. Union market share of the total workforce fell below 12 percent, while its share of the private workforce fell below 7 percent.

Public sector unions lost members across the board. They are down 273,000 members though federal, state and local governments only lost 100,000 jobs. These figures and associated news stories about public pension costs have prompted many on the left (including The Progressive, Mother Jones and Counterpunch) to declare it a “war on public sector workers.”

As much as I want to avoid mimicking such vitriolic language, the current situation isn’t as much a “war” as it is an insurrection after years of occupation. You have to engage in selective historical amnesia to paint public sector unions as victims.

In 2000, America employed about the same number of people in the private sector as it does now (102.8 million vs. 103 million). But during the last decade, most of which featured a Republican U.S. President and several years of GOP control of Congress, the number of public sector workers increased by 1.8 million.

In the 2000s, private sector unions lost more than 2.1 million members, while public sector unions added 508,000 members.

In other words, during a decade in which the private sector workforce increased a paltry 0.2 percent, the public sector workforce increased 9.2 percent. While private sector union membership declined 23.1 percent, public sector union membership rose 7.1 percent.

America has become an almost entirely non-union economy governed by a highly unionized political bureaucracy – essentially the opposite of the situation in the Fifties. Economic changes reduced the clout of the private sector unions. Only political changes can reduce the clout of the public sector unions.

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