Last Friday, Labor Secretary Jim Garner pointed to an increase in manufacturing jobs in Kansas as one of the bright spots of 2007's economic year. Garner made his comments while unveiling the new state economic report.

In the past, an increase in manufacturing jobs would mean an increase in union membership. But that's not the story in Kansas, where union membership has decreased by approximately 25 percent since 1992.

That's not good news for Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the state's Democratic Party and liberal Republicans - all traditional recipients of union financial support.

At the moment, Kansas' unions represent are restive. The union representing 750 members at Boeing, for example, rejected the company's final contract offer of an 11 percent wage hike last week and told workers to prepare for a strike. Employees at Hawker Beechcraft just ended a 25-day strike of their own.

But even if every union member in Kansas went on strike, only those who live in the most densely populated parts of the state - Topeka, Wichita and Kansas City - would ever see a picket line. Other than government employees, most parts of Kansas are union-free.

And the picket line itself would be relatively short. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were only 89,000 Kansas union members in 2007, a decrease from the 122,000 union members in Kansas fifteen years ago. Kansas union workers made up 11.4 percent of total Kansas employees in 1992 and only represented 7 percent of total employees in 2007.

At the national level union members decreased from 16,418,000 in 1992 to 15,670,000 in 2007. In 2007 union workers made up 12.1 percent of the total workforce, down from 15.7 percent in 1992.

Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said he thought the numbers were decreasing because of the increasing political involvement of union leaders.

“I really think it is the union officials own fault as they continue to do things that are out of the definition of what unions initially represented,” Mix told KansasLiberty.com. “Union officials have decided their recipe for success is politics.”

Mix said he felt the union presence in Kansas was fair in comparison to other states.

“I think the workers in Kansas have the best of both worlds as they have the ability to choose whether or not they want to pay union dues,” he said. “Kansas does a better job than many other states because they have to compete for the dollars.”

Stewart Acuff, assistant to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, agreed unions were heavily involved with politics and said this involvement was showcased at the recent National Democratic Conference.

“Unions are more politically involved now than in the recent past as the Sweeney administration is just much more focused on politics and this larger influence was reflected in Denver where 25 percent of delegates were union members,” Acuff told KansasLiberty.com.

Acuff said the AFL-CIO, which is currently supporting the Obama/Biden campaign, does not pay attention to partisan politics but rather focuses on the issues politicians represent.

“When we talk to union members about candidates we put them side-by-side on working family issues such as health care, social security, trade, workers freedom to form unions and bargain collectively,” he said.

Acuff disagreed that unions’ increasing political presence were to blame for the decline in union member density and instead listed President George W. Bush as one of the main reasons for the decline.

“He is the most anti-worker president in the history of the country which is partially why he has such abysmal poll ratings,” Acuff said.

Acuff said corporate intimidation and globalization are other reasons for the decline.

“Workers are now routinely intimidated, retaliated, and even fired for trying to form unions and that has been exacerbated by the fundamental shift in the economy,” he said. “Now it is a routine for corporate culture to do anything possible to stop workers from forming unions as union busting is now a 4-billion dollar a year industry.”

Unions are pinning their hopes on a new legislative initiative backed by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party called the "Employee Free Choice Act." Under the proposed law, unions would be able to represent employees in a company by convincing a simple majority of workers to sign cards saying they want representation, at which point all workers would then become members and pay union dues. Present federal law requires a secret ballot monitored by the National Labor Relations Board.

Supporters of the proposed bill say avoiding the federally-supervised secret-ballot elections would eliminate "corporate intimidation."

Opponents say union intimidation is a much bigger threat and that the new system would make public the identities of those who didn't want to join a union. Unions counter by saying there have been very few cases of union harassment of workers.

A recent Heritage Foundation study says, "Labor activists...distort the truth" when they claim there are few cases of union coercion. "In fact," said the report, "thousands of charges of unfair labor practices involving threats, violence, and coercion have been filed against unions since 2000."

The Week in Review