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Jarrett Skorup Vice President for Marketing and Communications for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy joined the America’s Work Force Union Podcast to talk about the five-year anniversary of the Janus Decision and its impact on union membership nationwide. Skorup also discussed how to collect union membership data accurately, and why union popularity remains high while membership decreases.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is a free-market think tank, with a focus on policy in Michigan. Over the last decade, labor issues have been a growing study subject for the Center. In 2018, just before the announcement of the Janus Decision, Skorup and his team began collecting data to track the decision's impact on unions. The Janus Decision ruled that forcing non-members to pay dues was illegal, and would allow any public sector employee to opt out of paying dues to the union.
There are two main ways that union membership numbers are normally collected. The first method, used mainly by news organizations, is to use the most recent survey to pull numbers. Unfortunately, due to the vagueness of the survey questions, these numbers are not accurate. The second method is to collect the data from self-reported reports in the union’s file. For the purposes of this study, these numbers were also deemed too inaccurate, he said. This forced Skorup and his team to take a new approach, filing public record requests with every public sector union employer to find detailed information on the number of employees paying dues, not paying dues or not part of the union.
With the contentious political environment over the last five years, Skorup believes many people chose not to join the unions due to political affiliations. Since the decision, unions that focused on improving their workers' standing at the negotiating table faired better at maintaining their members than those who didn’t. Additionally, Skorup added that they found 5 percent of the decrease in membership was due to automatic opt-outs that occurred immediately after the decision. The Center plans to continue this tracking every year and provide insights into any changes in the labor movement.
Listen to the entire episode to learn more.
America’s Work Force is the only daily labor podcast in the US and has been on the air since 1993, supplying listeners with useful, relevant input into their daily lives through fact-finding features, in-depth interviews, informative news segments and practical consumer reports. America’s Work Force is committed to providing an accessible venue in which America's workers and their families can hear discussion on important, relevant topics such as employment, healthcare, legislative action, labor-management relations, corporate practices, finances, local and national politics, consumer reports and labor issues.
America’s Work Force Union Podcast is brought to you in part by our sponsors: AFL-CIO, American Federation of Government Employees, American Federation of Musicians Local 4, American Alliance for Manufacturing, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, Communication Workers of America, International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers, International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers Local 50, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Crafts, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 6, Ironworkers Great Lakes District Council, The Labor Citizen newspaper, Laborers International Union of The National Labor Office of Blue Cross and Blue Shield, North America, North Coast Area Labor Federation, Ohio Federation of Teachers, Survey and Ballot Systems, United Labor Agency, United Steelworkers.
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