October 24, 2006
More on the Wagner Act IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Mr. Zeitz raises three points in his latest post.
First he writes, “The rise in median income for those involved in manufacturing may well have increased by 33.8 percent in real dollar terms between 1950 and 1999, but what Mr. Gordon doesn’t tell readers is that the portion of employed workers engaged in manufacturing has declined from 34 percent in 1950 to 16 percent in 1995.”
No, I didn’t tell the readers that. And, to be flip, I also didn’t tell them that the capital of Montana is Helena. The percentage of the workforce engaged in manufacturing has nothing to do with whether manufacturing workers are being paid more now than at a previous point in time.
Second he notes, quite correctly, that far more women are in the workforce today than in earlier decades and that this obscures the true income figures for households. It does indeed. But so does, and in the opposite way, the fact that households today have a much smaller number of people in them. In 1960 the average American household had 3.35 people living in it. Today the figure is 2.57, a nearly 25 percent drop. In other words, there are many more households to divide up total income, even correcting for population growth. This, of course, is an artifact of the country’s increasing prosperity: More people can afford to live on their own these days.
Third he writes, “Mr. Gordon has bemoaned the deficiencies of the CPI in past posts, but since the Census Bureau serves up its real numbers using the consumer price deflator, so have I.” We all do, because we have to work with the numbers available; we can’t have our own census and labor statistics bureaus. But it’s important to note that, because of an endless number of complications, such as the over-measure of inflation by the CPI, these numbers are not the bright-line, rock-solid facts we often treat them as. Statistics are no more than shadows on the cave wall, highly imperfect projections of a world we cannot see directly.
Mr. Zeitz writes that “wages and compensation in manufacturing have risen since 1950 because of unions . . . unions are being aggressively blocked from organizing workers in key private-sector service industries, which account for most jobs in the twenty-first-century economy, only strengthens the case for unions.”
I agree that many companies are making it as hard as possible for unions to organize (they always have, for obvious reasons) and are succeeding in many cases. Only about 50 percent of NLRB certification elections are won by unions, and many organizing drives don’t get as far as an election. But I think a major part of that is that the union movement is the one major sector of the American economy that has not evolved rapidly in the last half century. In far too many ways, it still views the American economy as being like the one confronted by John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther. Many American workers, far better educated, far more skilled, far more able to individually negotiate from strength, want no part of a movement they see as a relic of a long-ago past.
I have nothing against unions. It might surprise Mr. Zeitz to know that I once served as the president of an NLRB-recognized union and spent a couple of months negotiating a new contract with management. I learned a lot during that time.
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