Unions and Polling
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Gallup has its annual polling about unions and it’s quite telling in a number of ways. The top-line number is one that union advocates love to promote:
That’s great in theory. An uptick of 23 percent since the dark days of the late 2000s shows at the very least that economic organizing is something people once again accept. But does it mean anything? Will it lead to people actually joining unions? Once you start digging just a little deeper, the answers are less pleasing to we labor activists.
OK, now this ain’t so good. People might be interested in unions for other people, but they don’t seem to want them for themselves. So, uh, what this means is that their theoretical support for unions is unlikely to lead to anything, either significant increases in union density or the political changes such an increase would create.
Moreover, if anything, non-union members are actually more involved in trying to regulate their job conditions than union workers.
You have to take polling on anything with extreme skepticism. With issue polling, the question really shouldn’t be “do you support this or that?” It needs to be “what are you going to do with that position?” And on labor issues, for a lot of workers the answer remains nothing.