Crain's Chicago Business reports:
Multinational corporations have a new ally in their battles with organized labor: unionized workers.
There's more:
As organized labor loses leverage in a race-to-the-bottom global market, some workers are becoming so disillusioned by what their unions can, or rather can't, do for them that they want out. The disaffected include dozens of machinists at Caterpillar Inc.'s plant in Joliet who crossed the picket line during a strike last summer and are planning unfair labor practices complaints against the union.
The coerced labor movement is in decline:
Organized labor's slippage is most acute in the manufacturing sector, which has lost 4.7 million jobs and seen membership shrink by almost a third since 2001, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, private-sector union membership stands at just 6.9 percent nationally and 10.6 percent in Illinois.
No word yet on this story from Richard "The Fifth Amendment" Trumka of the
AFL-CIO.
