Word: membership
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Membership is declining primarily because unions have failed to adjust to an enormous postwar switch in job patterns. Their prime appeal has always been to male factory hands. But manufacturing has gone down in importance, while workers have flooded into wholesale and retail trade, service industries and white-collar occupations like computer programming?all predominantly nonunion...
...common-situs bill that would have allowed a single striking union to shut an entire construction site went down to a totally unexpected defeat in the House. Two months ago, the unions lost on a labor-reform bill that they regarded as vital to reverse their decline in membership. The bill, among other things, would have allowed organizers easier access to nonunion shops...
Failure to expand membership, of course, is one reason for this loss of power. The smaller the proportion of workers that he speaks for, the less influence a union leader has with a politician. In Massachusetts, the state AFL-CIO, hit by sagging membership, lacks the $150,000 that it needs to computerize its lists of voters. Knowing that the unions' ability to turn out the vote has declined, Bay State politicos feel less obligated to court labor...
Wurf's foghorn voice offers even more hope. In the 14 years that he has been president of the AFSCME, he has quadrupled its membership to just over 1 million, and signed up people thought to be particularly difficult to organize: white-collar workers, women, blacks. His main pitch: an insistence that union membership is the passport not just to better pay but also to "dignity" for workers who, he contends, were long "at the mercy of irresponsible politicians...
Three years ago, prodded by some big-city chapters that are more used to career women than the small-town outfits that account for most of the nearly 9,000 Jaycee clubs, the headquarters in Tulsa, Okla., grudgingly decided to allow full membership for females on a test basis in Massachusetts, Alaska and Washington, B.C. The experiment was a hit with many of the chapters concerned. But not, alas, with the 4,500 delegates who attended the Jaycees convention in Atlantic City, N.J., last June. They voted 3 to 1 to ban women, and newly elected Jaycees President Barry Kennedy...