The Golden Gate

California Conservative offers some thoughts on the SEIU and Teamsters Unions splitting off from the big AFL-CIO labor organization. This means that the the AFL-CIO has lost 3.2 million of its previous 13 million or so members.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement. Two of the largest and more successful unions, the Service Employees International and the Teamsters, are rebelling against the leadership of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. The irony is that it wasn’t all that long ago, in 1995, that Mr. Sweeney won his job with his own coup against Lane Kirkland, the Cold War hero and more moderate labor voice.

In the wake of the GOP takeover of Congress the year before, Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left–environmental groups, culturally liberal outfits–and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5% from 12.9% in 2003. In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.

Yes, and if you take a close look at the curves on the chart above, you’ll see that a much greater percentage of all Government workers — approximately 35% — are Unionized than are workers in the “real world” private sector (8%). One might conclude that it’s the Government Unions that are keeping the labor “movement” alive, to the extent that it IS still alive.

And, of course, those Government Unions are supported with our tax dollars.

The Wall Street Journal piece says it clearly:

The tragedy is that neither [union] faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.

Precisely. And as far as serving the taxpayers and businesses of our nation is concerned, it must be asked: are Government Unions helping or harming the cause of more efficient and effective Governenmental operations? Are we getting “bang for our bucks?” And, really, is this the best we can do for workers? Government Unions — extorting from the public they ostensibly “serve?”

The recent BART transit strike brinksmanship is an object lesson, and quite fresh in our collective memory.

I suggest that perhaps it’s time to move beyond the old adversarial class-warfare Union-versus-management model. Surely we can do better than what we’ve got, now. And I think it’s clear, we’re going to have to. The old style Union model is dying out.