Union Membership Falls To Hundred-Year Low

by JASmius



Headed inexorably towards extinction, like the corrupt, thuggish Neanderthals they really are:

According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today, the union membership rate fell to 11.1%, with just 14.6 million wage and salaried workers maintaining membership.

In 2013, the union membership rate was 0.2% points higher, at 11.3%.

The rate of union membership has been on a steady decline over the past three decades. It grew slightly from 12.1% in 2007 to 12.4% in 2008. During President Obama’s first year in office, however, it fell once more.

As it will continue to do, and for one very straightforward reason above all: organized labor is obsolete.  In industrial-age days gone by, in the world of fewer, larger employers, there was a legitimate need for unions to represent the rank & file "little guys".  But in today's post-industrial, small-business-driven, entrepreneurial modern economy - before Barack "Too Big To Fail" Obama destroyed "fundamentally transformed" it, anyway - there simply isn't the same big vs. small, adversarial relationship between management and labor, and consequently no longer the need for unionism that there once was.  This is reflected in the reality that the public sector is now the stronghold of Big Labor, with all the corruption and abuses of power to which it has given rise in the Obama era.  Without that political incest, Big Labor might have withered on the vine years ago.  With it, they will continue to linger, powerful out of all proportion to their actual base, a classic case of "It's not how many you know, it's WHO you know."

Is this ironic coming from a guy who could have seriously used union representation to block the major league screwing I absorbed a little over a year ago?  Yes, it is.  But the exception, as they say, proves the rule.  Or something like that.