Bring Out Yer Dead.

Remember that famous scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail during the plague? A cart is pulled around the village to pick up dead peasants. Cries of “bring out yer dead” can be heard across the village. At some point a not-quite-dead villager is about to be hoisted onto the cart when he protests that he is not dead and instead is “feeling much better.” Until someone smacks him on the head and throws him on the cart. Unions must feel a lot like that guy. Conventional wisdom has pronounced unions dead. Again.  Total membership has dropped to its lowest level on record. Only 7.2% of private sector workers are union members and for the first time ever there are now more government union members than private sector ones.

The 60-member Senate supermajority that swept into office in 2008, in no small part due to the efforts of union members, failed to pass healthcare or the Free Choice Act. Then the supermajority was destroyed by, of all things, a Republican being voted into the Senate seat formerly held (for over 40 years) by Ted Kennedy. This week even a seemingly simple appointment to the National Labor Relations Board failed overwhelmingly in the Senate. Craig Becker not only failed to get the 60 votes needed to win the appointment, but 11 Democrats risked a blizzard to vote against his nomination, thumbing their noses at unions in the process. The Huffington Post this week argued that unions are just getting what they deserve. Their focus on politics and top-down organizing has destroyed what should be the core strength of unions, the grassroots. The argument goes that unions spend so much time on politics and anti-corporate campaigns because it makes the top echelon of the union movement feel like big shots. However, these tactics do little to generate real political strength, which explains why unions are having such a difficult time getting their agenda through even a sympathetic government. The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t exactly jive with the facts. I will grant that unions took most of the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 off to get their President elected and inaugurated, and that shows up in the statistics. But traditional union organizing has been on a dramatic decline for years, and the grassroots were still effective in 2008 (not to mention the extremely close elections in 2000 and 2004 as well). Take a look at what traditional NLRB organizing has looked like over the last five years: While petitions did drop about 12% in 2009, this pales in comparison to the 25% drop in 2006. While these statistics do support the idea that unions have begun to rely less and less on the traditional NLRB election, the number of petitions filed has remained relatively steady the last 4 years. Not only that, recent petition activity has been on the rise. Take a look at this: NLRB elections are up a substantial 38% over January 2009 and the general trend over the last quarter is up. Our firm consults in hundreds of elections each year (over twice as many as our next closest competitor) and we are engaged to assist even more companies experiencing pre-petition organizing activity. The last couple of months have been noticeably more active than, say, the first half of 2009. Unions are far from dead. If anything, it looks like they may have learned their lesson in 2008. Unions cannot sit back and wait for Washington to come to their rescue. They will have to save themselves if they are going to be saved at all. And if recent trends are any indication, it looks like they are making an attempt to do just that.