Dale McFeatters: Little for unions to celebrate on Labor Day

Some years ago, there was a popular bumper sticker that read: "The Weekend, Brought To You By The Labor Movement." And it was true.

The labor movement brought that and much else -- child-labor laws, wage and hour laws (think the eight-hour day, the 40-hour week and overtime), occupational safety and health regulations, paid vacations and a decent retirement.

At one time in our history, to get those benefits a worker almost had to have a union job, but, increasingly, they became a matter of federal and state law. The labor movement, as was frequently remarked, had become a victim of its own success.

According to the Census Bureau, 85 percent of full-time workers ages 18 to 64 have jobs with health benefits, and the larger percentage of those covered are union members. But as the country inches ever closer to universal health care, under whatever name it's called, that becomes one less benefit a worker needs a union for.

As a result, union membership, which stood at 26.7 percent of the workforce in 1973, has fallen to around 13 percent. Among private employers, union membership has become increasingly rare.

The exception was public employees, where union membership remained strong and the strongest unions in the country may well be those representing police and firefighters and the largest those representing teachers.

But this Labor Day is finding that those public-worker unions are under a sustained assault by the Republican Party. Taking note of the states that have largely stripped government unions of their collective bargaining rights, the GOP platform said, "We salute the Republican Governors and State legislators who have saved their States from fiscal disaster by reforming their laws governing public employee unions." And it urged the states to further weaken the unions by refusing to collect dues by payroll deductions on their behalf.

The census says the median income -- meaning half make more, half less -- for full-time workers is $47,717 for men and $36,931 for women, but the most ferocious battle in Congress is protecting tax cuts for people earning more than $200,000.

For most taxpayers, the argument over income-tax rates is almost academic since more than two-thirds of them pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than they do in income taxes.

Income inequality is a growing problem in the United States. American workers are admirably free of envy and covetousness, but one day that gap could begin provoking outrage, maybe even enough outrage to revive the near-dormant labor movement.

Dale McFeatters is a senior writer for the Scripps Howard News Service.