Study confirms changes in organized labor

Sam Marcy, the founding chairperson of Workers World Party and a farseeing contributor to the Marxist-Leninist tradition, foretold in his 1986 book “High Tech Low Pay” that women and people of color would soon gain ascendancy in the U.S. working class. Now a scholarly study, “The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008,” published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, verifies just that in the organized labor movement.

Here’s a brief overview of some of the current data on organized labor in the U.S. in 2008 and the changes reflected over the last quarter century:

• Over 45 percent of unionized workers are women, up from 35 percent in 1981. At current growth rates women will be the majority of unionized workers before 2020.

• Latino/as are 12.2 percent of the unionized workforce, up from 5.8 percent in 1983. Asian Pacific-Americans were 4.6 percent of union workers, up from 2.5 percent in 1989.

• About one in eight (12.6 percent) union workers is an immigrant, up from one in 12 (8.4 percent) in 1994 (the first year when consistent data were available).

• Black workers are about 13 percent of the unionized workforce, a percentage that has held fairly steady since 1983, despite a large decline in the percentage of whites in the same time period.

• Just under half (48.9 percent) of unionized workers are in the public sector, up from about a third (34.4 percent) in 1983. About 61 percent of unionized women are in the public sector, compared to about 38 percent of men.

• Of the remaining half of the unionized workforce, four out of every 10 workers are in the private sector outside of manufacturing, and one of every 10 is in manufacturing, down from almost 30 percent in 1983.

• The most heavily unionized age group is 55 to 64 years old (18.4 percent of this age group are in a union). The least unionized age group is 16 to 24 years old (5.7 percent).

As the organized working class struggles in this recession to assert its needs and aspirations, which are on a collision course with the ruthless greed of the ruling class, it’s important to know that women and people of color will be leading the charge.

Of course all workers—organized and unorganized, undocumented and unemployed—and all the oppressed need to unite to win the economic and social justice that should be their birthright.