Jump-Starting the Labor Movement
Let's stop celebrating Labor Day -- by which I mean, let's stop assuming that the hard-won gains of organized labor in the United States are a done deal. And let's start using Labor Day to rededicate ourselves to the victories labor must win if it is to help working families in the 21st century.</br></br>In some ways, the end of this century resembles the end of the last one. Corporations have regained the kind of unfair advantages over working people that they have not enjoyed for nearly 100 years. And with this, we find many of the darker impulses of the Gilded Age alive and well among today's entrepreneurs -- specifically, the willingness to roll over working people who seem powerless.</br></br>In the 1990s, Americans are working harder than ever -- and they've got the stress to show for it. Millions now know what it's like to work uncompensated overtime in understaffed offices, or to work two jobs or to go without vacations and health insurance. For all this extra productivity that's been squeezed out of them in today's "lean and mean" workplace, the average American worker today earns less, works longer hours and spends less time with family.</br></br>Workers kept their side of the bargain in making America more competitive again, but the gains they won were not equally shared. And this inequality is going to continue until workers become as organized as they did in the labor movement's prime.</br></br>About 16 million American workers are represented by unions today. That's down 24.5 percent since 1980, at a time when our work force (approaching 137 million) is at an all-time high. Some say the reason is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. But the United States has more manufacturing jobs today than ever before -- the jobs just have moved south and west, to states where workers are not organized. Labor can't win better pay and benefits for members when employers down the street require unorganized workers to do the same work for lower wages and fewer benefits.