Modern News

For the better part of the last 50 years, labor unions have steadily declined in membership and in percentage of the workforce. There have been many reasons floated to explain this, but Michael L. Wachter of the University of Pennsylvania Law School has an interesting take on the issue.

Wachter thinks that free competition, free trade and good old American capitalism is the reason unions have declined. Here is how he prefaces his study:

Union membership, as a percentage of the private sector workforce, has been in decline for 50 years. I argue that the cause of this unrelenting decline is due to a single fundamental factor – the change in the United States economy from a corporatist-regulated economy to one based on free competition. Most labor commentators have explained the decline by a confluence of unrelated economic and legal forces. In my approach, to understand the causes of the decline in union membership it is critical to return to the period of the original growth in union power; that is, to the New Deal. In examining the differences in the economy between today and the New Deal, one must look not only to labor law, but also to corporate law and antitrust. For unions to be successful, the goals of labor law need to be consistent with the goals of corporate law and antitrust. While the goals were consistent in the 1930s, they are in conflict today.

I am currently reviewing this study and if anything more interesting comes up, I’ll write about it here.