Wednesday, July 21, 2010

WHILE warming up on a bicycle at the gym Monday afternoon, I caught the text trailer on Fox News. Someone named Parker was saying that closed union shops were impeding job creation around the country. The TV's sound was off, so I don't know what people were actually saying, but the trailer keep saying that unions were preventing job creation.

So, with a quick Google later, I found this quotation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2009, the union membership rate — the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union — was 12.3 percent, essentially unchanged from 12.4 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions declined by 771,000 to 15.3 million, largely reflecting the overall drop in employment due to the recession. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over.

So, 12.3 percent of the wage/salary workforce is unionized, and although the BLS doesn't say how many are in closed shops (not all unionized workers are in closed shops, so far as I know), this statistic means that 87.7 percent of the wage/salary workforce is NOT unionized.

Are we to believe that companies employing 12 percent of the workforce are keeping the companies employing the other 88 percent from creating more jobs? Gee, that 12 percent must be really intimidating. Or is this just another example of the fictions that constitute "news" at Fox?

SOME really sensible advice is offered by Lexington in The Economist.