The percentage of workers who are part of a union fell to its lowest in 76 years last year. 2012 recorded a mere 11.3 percent membership.
The number of workers who belong to a union fell by 400,000 in 2012 when compared to the number in 2011. The percentage dipped from 11.8 percent in 2011 to 11.3 percent in 2012, which is reportedly the lowest since Franklin Roosevelt was president in 1936.
Robert Bruno, professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, cited lawmakers to be the reason for the decline.
"A growing number of laws that make organizing workers more difficult were part of the reason for an incremental erosion of the labor movement," he said. "It goes back a couple of decades, that there has been a growing number of anti-labor policies," Bruno said. "We have the weakest labor law and enforcement of labor law in the entire Western industrialized world."
Last year, union membership also saw a major decline in states like Illinois and New York. Lawmakers struggling with public employee pension crises and sharp drops in tax revenue have sought concessions from public workers.
"It reflects a number of things beyond labor's control, such as the state of the economy," said Harley Shaiken, labor relations professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "It used to be big labor and big business. Now we have small labor and big business."
Market an labor experts think unions are also to be blamed.
"They must now admit that they are not investing enough staff and funds in organizing and not embarking on an imaginative journey to rediscover the relevancy of unions," said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. "Essentially, workers are feeling tremendous job insecurity ... Yet as today's figures suggest, workers are not turning to unions to act as their voice."
