Unions - The 12% Of The Labor Population Who Have The Sentiments Of The Progressives At The Expense Of Jobs & Quality Education

Bureau Of Labor Statistics: Union Membership

According to the Obama Administration Labor Department - only 12.4% of America's work force are union members.

In 2008, union members accounted for 12.4 percent of employed wage
and salary workers, up from 12.1 percent a year earlier, the U.S.
Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The
number of workers belonging to a union rose by 428,000 to 16.1 million.
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.

Some highlights from the 2008 data are:

--Government workers were nearly five times more likely to belong
to a union than were private sector employees.

--Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the
highest unionization rate at 38.7 percent.

--Black workers were more likely to be union members than were
white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.

--Among states, New York had the highest union membership rate
(24.9 percent) and North Carolina had the lowest rate (3.5 percent).

If my math serves me correctly unions members which are 12.4% of the work force and have 16.1 million members are operating within a base of 129.8 million workers in the labor force.
If you listen to various Democratic and Progressive operatives they believe that the road to prosperity for the working class in America is to chip away at the remaining 113.7 million laborers who are not working.

This is an excellent time for me to make a quick diversion using a metaphor in order to express my belief about what is going on here. This model closely approximates my views about the economy in general.

I view the American economy and its labor force as a river of resources. The flow of the river increases and decreased based on a number of different forces that bear upon it. The government via the policies that it implements is a force that bears upon this river. Government is not a tributary in and of itself that generates water for the river. Instead it can "redistribute" water to other consumers, store the water in a reservoir for use in emergencies and it can consume so much of the water for its own purposes that it does damage to others who seek to drink the water as well.

In regards to labor and employment - government policies are very much the same. Aside from the relatively small number of employees that the government has to administrate government affairs and services - the government does not directly create jobs in the private sector. The government can only ever leverage economic resources derived from the public to establish conditions that are favorable to employment or in some cases go too far and make a location an unfavorable business location.

In listening to progressives - one would be lead to believe that if America simply recommitted its resolve to organized labor that workers would have a better time of it.

The problem is that UNIONS don't create jobs. Like the river in the above example - unions don't "create the pie" - they simply increase the size of the slice of pie that the worker takes home. For potential workers who find themselves unemployed - building a new union hall will not improve their fortunes.