SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Pushed to the margins of the U.S. economy, labor unions are engaged in an epic struggle to preserve their members’ wages and benefits.
For the most part, they’re losing.
Union members across America still enjoy higher pay on average than their nonunion counterparts, but the gap is shrinking. Organized labor is under persistent pressure to make concessions. Diminishing membership also has eroded union power.
The United Auto Workers gave ailing Detroit automakers $1 billion in cuts. Pilots at American Airlines learned last month their pay and benefits could get reduced substantially. Even California’s powerful public-employee unions have given ground in recent years.
And in the biggest labor battle the Sacramento region has seen in years, northern California’s three union supermarket chains — Raley’s, Safeway and Save Mart — are pushing for concessions on health care and other issues, arguing they need to cut labor costs to compete against Wal-Mart and other nonunion stores.
In reality, both sides are vulnerable, and both have reason to fear a confrontation, said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Raley’s is already struggling, and “a strike could be devastating,” Jacobs said. Also, the union can’t afford “to push Raley’s off a cliff” by striking, he said, since that could ultimately cost workers their jobs. “It has an impact on how much the union can achieve,” Jacobs said.
Few unions are immune to the pressure to accept concessions, particularly in a difficult economy. That’s true even for public employees, a remaining stronghold for union membership. More than half of all union members in America are now government workers.
Concessions have been steeper in the private sector, where competition is fierce, firms are struggling and nonunion alternatives abound.
For instance, the UAW in 2009 suspended dental care, agreed to cutbacks in drug coverage and made other concessions to help keep U.S. automakers from going under. The concessions, totaling $1 billion, were made as part of the federal bailout of the industry.
Even in a growing field such as telecommunications, cost pressures can be relentless.
It becomes hard for unions to protect wages in “industries that have alternatives, where you have companies with lower prices,” said David Smith, a labor economist at Pepperdine University.
Smith said union workers make about 15 percent more, on average, than nonunion counterparts in the same occupations. The gap is considerably higher in some industries, like construction, according to federal data.
Just 11.8 percent of America’s workforce belonged to a union in 2001, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, down from 20 percent in 1983.
