More than a century after Labor Day first trumpeted the contribution of the American worker, organized labor in Ohio is fighting to regain relevance.
Unions have taken their biggest hits in places like the Buckeye State, where manufacturing companies once dotted the landscape.
In 2001, union membership in Ohio stood at more than 900,000 members, or 17.6 percent of the working population, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since then, unions have lost more than 200,000 members, marking a nearly 25 percent drop, to 685,000 last year.
In Dayton, the drop in union membership has some clear culprits. The General Motors Moraine Assembly plant, which at one time employed tens of thousands of workers, closed in 2008 when it was down to 1,400 jobs. At its all-time peak in the 1960s, more than 37 percent of Ohio workers belonged to a union.
However, union officials insist organized labor isn’t going away. While their manufacturing-related membership has dropped, unions are gaining ranks in the public sector and pushing hard to land service sector workers. At the same time, unions are changing tactics to shore up industrial membership.
The IUE-CWA, the manufacturing division of Washington, D.C.-based Communication Workers of America, has been working for several years on getting its members additional skills training. The effort is part of an overall shift from being an adversary to being a partner with business, said Jim Clark, president of IUE-CWA, which relocated its headquarters to Dayton in 2008 and represents more than 50,000 workers across the country.
The more recent push includes lean performance training and a manufacturing skills training certification program. A “green” worker module is coming online next year. The IUE-CWA trains its members in a variety of ways: by providing it directly, working with business and partnering with institutions such as Sinclair Community College.
The goal, Clark said, is to help employers retain jobs that would normally be lost, and put them in a position to add jobs.
The union’s biggest target is companies that can’t afford to invest in training, which might turn the business around.
“If they’re one of our manufacturers and they get in trouble, we roll our sleeves up and we help pay the freight … and we help save that business,” Clark said. “We’re here for the long haul.”
However, local union ranks have taken a big hit recently. Last year, the Dayton-Springfield region had about 48,000 union members, or about 11 percent of the total workforce, according to unionstats.com, a Web site that tracks membership. Those numbers are down from nearly 68,000 members — or more than 15 percent of the total workforce — in 2000.
The public sector has been the one bright spot for unions as it has added workers.
Locally, the majority of union members, or about 30,000, are public sector employees. In 2000, only a third of members — about 23,000 — were public sector employees.
Andrew Doehrel, president and chief executive officer of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, finds it troubling that union membership is up in the public sector.
“It hampers government’s ability to be responsive; it creates a new set of challenges,” Doehrel said.
Richard Stock, an economist and director of the University of Dayton’s Business Research Group, said although unions have been working to organize in the service sector, they haven’t been successful enough to offset the declines in manufacturing.
Health care has been a big target for the unions — something that worries industry officials — but overall the labor market is “way too fragile” for unions to make any significant gains in the next few years, Stock said.
In spite of declining numbers, unions are still grabbing headlines for their role in the fate of some big chunks of area jobs.
The United Auto Workers, for example, is headed for a big battle over terms of a new deal that will determine if roughly 700 jobs stay at Navistar International Corp.’s truck assembly plant in Springfield. A three-year contract covering the UAW across six facilities including the one in Clark County expires Oct. 1. And last fall, about 900 jobs at the Dayton Behr Thermal plant were saved when IUE-CWA Local 775 and the company were able to hammer out a four-year deal.
Despite their longstanding relationships, unions have not been able to get into some manufacturers, namely Honda Motor Co. Ltd. (NYSE: HMC), which has 2,750 workers north of Dayton in Anna. But many U.S. manufacturers, such as Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) and Butler County-based AK Steel (NYSE: AKS) have a unionized workforce. Other companies with union workforces include United Parcel Service (NYSE: UPS), Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T).
Declining membership numbers might give the appearance that unions are less important these days, but Doehrel said unions in Ohio remain relevant because they represent a block of people that can be motivated. He draws a parallel to the Tea Party movement, where a core group of people are willing to take action.
“(Union members) are people that are willing to be involved and energized, so they continue to have an impact,” Doehrel said. “While it’s changed in the makeup here in Ohio, we are still a union state.”
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