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Busting The Myth of Union Job Security

...Just another example on how today's union bosses mislead the public.

By: LaborUnionReport (Diary)  |  November 18th, 2011 at 04:46 PM  | 

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For years, unions have created a myth around manufacturing in the United States having been destroyed by the [ insert perjorative here ].

The fact is, manufacturing is not dead in the United States. It is a myth created to mislead the public on unions’ own destructiveness on companies and the jobs of employees. What union bosses have been screaming about is, in fact, the decline of unionized manufacturing.

While all manufacturing has decreased since America’s current economic recession began, from 1983 through 2006, union-free manufacturing had actually increased by 52,000 jobs.

This chart may help explain in more vivid terms how distorted the union bosses’ arguments are:

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

Cross-posted at LaborUnionReport.com

COMMENTS

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  • jakeofalltrades

    I have never encountered this information before.

  • mystryda

    Not trying to cast dispersion on these numbers, but are they normalized for inflation? That is, are the non-union jobs measured as 12B$ and 14B$, respectively, in 2010 $USD, or such?

    • quill67

      There is no need to convert. The numbers are not in dollars but in jobs. (I assume full time jobs) We know nothing about the pay so no reason to put into 2010 $ or not.

      However, if one were to calculate the percentage of jobs that are manufacturing today that number would obviously show a significant loss in the percentage of jobs in manufacturing. But even this statistic is really meaningless. Nearly 50% of people worked on farms at the turn of the previous century, but today only between 2-3% work on farms. Is this a tragedy? No. We simply have gotten better at farming and now those people produce other important goods and services.

    • http://www.laborunionreport.com LaborUnionReport

      The data is compiled by the economist(s) at UnionStats.com based on information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  • bobguzzardi

    I, too, have never seen this data. I think the US actually manufactures more with fewer workers because of technological efficiencies. Not a bad thing.

  • DerKrieger

    … I work for Walmart in international logistics so I get to see first hand the correlation between the cost of labor and mechanization or automation in our distribution centers. In our UK operations there is a high level of automation because labor unions have made it cheaper for us to invest in and operate expensive distribution systems. Labor displaced itself. The flip side is that a lot of jobs have been created upstream in automation, robotics, electronics, and programming. A modern DC is quite a marvel.

    Contrast that with our DCs in much of Latin America, China, and India where the cost of labor is lower and there is little to no automation. It isn’t cost effective.

    Unions, and the regulatory state, are mostly responsible for the decline of low value manufacturing from the US. What manufacturing that remains tends to be in the production of more higher value products.

    And as a side note, the BLS and Labor Department consider mining and electricity generation “manufacturing”. Not sure how the numbers would be affected if these categories weren’t counted.

  • losmacs

    but I see nothing for 2006 and have no way to gauge the accuracy of the claim of a 52k gain in non-union jobs. Where is your data? (I am accustomed to liberals fudging stats; I don’t expect us conservatives to fall into the same sloppy ways).