Paul Krugman

Where have all the unions gone?Unionstats.com Why did this happen? You often hear assertions to the effect that globalization killed the labor movement, because unionized firms couldn’t cope with international competition. But this story doesn’t hold up in the face of the facts. First, while unions have lost some ground in many countries, the collapse of organized labor in America is unique. Denmark is every bit as integrated with the global economy as we are, yet two-thirds of its workers are union members. A quarter of Canadian workers are unionized, which is only a modest decline from the proportion half a century ago. Also, while a global competition story might seem to make sense for manufacturing firms, there’s no reason unions have to be restricted to manufacturing. These days America’s biggest private employers are Walmart, Amazon, Kroger and Home Depot. (Amazon may look to consumers like a virtual company that exists only in cyberspace, but those quick deliveries are made possible by more than a million workers, mainly employed in a vast network of warehouses, and a complex delivery system.) And the services provided by today’s giant service-sector companies aren’t subject to global competition: You can’t get two-day delivery or fresh produce from a factory in Guangzhou. There is, in other words, no inherent economic reason for the implosion of the U.S. labor movement. So what did happen? Politics. Unions could have remained an important force in American life, even as we transitioned from a manufacturing to a service economy. But to do so they would have had to organize workers in rapidly growing service companies like Walmart and now Amazon. And they generally failed to do so, because the transition to a service economy took place in an era of conservative political dominance.