Sep 4, 2011 2 min read

This Labor Day finds the union movement at one of its lowest points in history.

Last year, the percentage of unionized workers fell to 11.9 percent, the lowest in 70 years, and the number of workers in government unions, 7.6 million, surpassed the number in private sector unions, 7.1 million. And both of those figures were down from the previous year.

For the past decade, American workers’ wages have been stagnant when they haven’t been falling. Presumably this is a situation made for unions, but with unemployment over 9 percent and employers quick to outsource, workers fear losing what little they have. The country’s largest and most powerful unions, like the autoworkers and the steelworkers, were formed in the ’30s when conditions were much tougher. But time has passed, and more know Labor Day less as a celebration of America’s unionized workers than the semiofficial end of summer.

The headquarters of American labor, the AFL-CIO, sits a block from the White House in downtown Washington. Most mornings, you can hear noisy labor picket lines nearby of 20 or so people — chanting, drumming on buckets and cowbells, blowing whistles and air horns, and carrying picket signs.

They are protesting on behalf of the nonunion drywall hangers on construction sites. But these aren’t members of the carpenters union. They are homeless people, hard cases down on their luck, hired for $8 an hour, with no benefits, to picket.

It’s just another sign of how far the union movement has fallen since its glory days in the 1950s and 1960s. And you have to wonder if unions will ever see a return of those heady days.

Scripps Howard News Service