There seems to be much more to it than just that though. From Krugman:
"Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize."
You can't simply explain the death of unions by saying manufacturing has gone overseas. Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized. Now they're not. Why?
Unions in some sectors are more powerful than ever. Nurse unions in particular are very strong, much more so than they were fifty years ago. The education sector, construction, and government employees at all levels, have very strong unions. If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?
Also, to a large extent occupational licensing has replaced unionization. See this paper for instance: http://ftp.iza.org/dp3675.pdf
Excerpts:
"During the early 1950s, less than 5 percent of the U.S. work force was covered by licensing laws at the state level (Council of State Governments, 1952). That grew to almost 18 percent by the 1980s with an even larger number if federal, city and county occupational licensing is included. By 2000, the percent of the workforce in occupations licensed by states was at least 20 percent, according to data gathered from the Department of Labor and the 2000 Census. ...Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions - that is about 15 percent..."
It's hard to unionize a hair salon, because anyone can open a competing hair salon and undercut the prices. So instead, the hair dressers lobby the legislature to pass occupational licensing laws which create barriers to entry, thus raising the pay.
Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized.
Were they? Places like Sears or Sandy's Drive-In were not unionized in the 1970's. Which service and retail jobs were unionized in the 70's that are not today?
One theory is that its hard to establish unions in industries that are mobile and have low costs to entry. If Walmart employees unionized, it wouldn't be long before a Target moved in and undercut their prices by using non-union workers. Pre-1950, factories were only profitable near rail lines and ports. The rise of the highway system and power lines made factories much more mobile. This allowed factories to move to locations where unions were not so powerful. This is the Doug Rae theory from the book I recommended above. I don't really buy it though.
More likely, I think the high unionization rates of the 1950's were a result of New Deal and World War II corporatism. As the giant "organization man" corporations created by the New Deal gradually declined, so did unionization.
I'm curious. You run a company. If you were interviewing a potential employee, and he announced to you that he might strategically refuse to come to work at some point in order to extract a higher wage, would this make you think twice about hiring him? Do you think the government should make it illegal for you to hold the candidate's comment against him in the hiring process?
If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?
I think it's mainly just because politicians don't want to shit where they live.
I'm in the capital city of my country, ~50% of the jobs here are public, you can't turn around here without bumping into a government department. As slow and plodding as any public bureaucracy is, if the politicians were to start attacking the public service union, they can say goodbye to any hope of getting anything done, and they know it.
In my country, the early to mid 70's was probably the peak of the left-wing socialist ideal prevailing as the popular paradigm. This scared the hell out of conservatives (of both major parties) and they've been doing their damn best for the last 30 odd years to pull the political spectrum so far to the right that even the left-wing isn't very left-wing anymore. Curtailing the power of unions was part of their strategy. It wasn't just an unintended byproduct of ostensibly peripheral phenomena. And you know, I'd actually have a lot more respect for those guys if they just came out and said: "Yup, we don't like unions and we're trying to gut them for reasons X, Y and Z."
I'm not trying to argue the all in, pro-union line either, but lets call a spade a spade.
I think you're mistaking my comments as pro-union, they're not. It's one of the few areas in which I agree with the Republicans. I very much thank them for their systematic destruction of them.
Nonetheless, that's what they've done. Unions as a whole are much less powerful today than they were 30 years ago, even though some have grown stronger.
Grocery was one area of retail largely unionized. Some still exist under the UFCW, but are being cannibalized by non-union department stores such as Wal-Mart and Target which now both offer groceries.
"Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize."
You can't simply explain the death of unions by saying manufacturing has gone overseas. Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized. Now they're not. Why?