The Right to Organize at Work Deserves Constitutional Protection
On Labor Day, alongside stories about parades and final trips to the beach, we can expect to read the usual depressing statistics about the decline of labor unions in the United States. The problem with this coverage isn’t the facts, which are undeniable — it’s the tone of inevitability. Today, less than 11 percent of workers, including just 7 percent in the private sector, are members of a union — a dramatic drop from the 1950s, when more than one-third of the workforce was unionized. The recent loss by the United Auto Workers at a Mississippi Nissan factory, where workers voted by a three-to-one ratio against union representation, is just the latest in a long string of defeats for the labor movement. And this decline has a real effect on families’ financial security: Researchers have shown that nearly half of the decline in middle-class incomes is due to the shrinking […]