Posted on

In Government, Every Day Is Labor Day

seiu-Obama-1

If there’s a day of the year to notice the paradox of organized labor, Labor Day is it.

Ira Stoll | September 1, 2014

here’s a day of the year to notice the paradox of organized labor, Labor Day is it.

The paradox is this: even as private sector unionism has declined, public sector unionism is in some ways more influential than ever.

The numbers tell the story. Among private sector employees — the ones who work for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations that are not part of the government — the percentage who belong to labor unions plummeted to a mere 7.5 percent last year, from 23.3 percent in 1977, according to UnionStats.com. By the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more restrictive accounting, a mere 6.7 percent of private sector workers were in unions in 2013.

Among government workers, it’s a whole different story: 40.8 percent of local government workers — teachers, police, firefighters, librarians — belong to unions, according to the BLS numbers. The public sector rate drops to 35.3 percent (38.7 percent by the UnionStats.com numbers) if you include state and federal employees — postal workers, corrections officers. That’s so much higher than the private sector that it’s almost a tale of two labor movements — one, in the private sector, that is diminishing to irrelevance, and another, in the public sector, that retains substantial clout.

https://reason.com/archives/2014/09/01/in-government-every-day-is-labor-day

5 thoughts on “In Government, Every Day Is Labor Day

  1. Government deadbeats who cannot get a job in the private sector in most cases.

  2. Except for a VM Queen Bee.

  3. Not a group I would want to belong to

  4. That’s a very racist photo.
    How come Obama had no whites in the phot with him?

  5. Unionising against American public. What a joke.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *