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Comment by solidasparagus | Hacker News Reader

There are regular surveys that cover how many people are in unions and the overall perception of unions. The numbers back up the idea that unions are dying and people don't think highly of them.

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There are also solid propaganda campaigns running against unions in the US. This makes the data quite difficult to interpret.

Really? The majority of Americans are pro-union and a solid majority sees their decline as a bad thing.

It's been declining for decades and over half a century. They didn't know how bad they were. Who supports unions in the US and what majority? Who said that?

Huh, you're right about the popularity when asked in the abstract. It isn't at the old level of popularity, but support has risen quite a bit in the last few years and is back to a majority. That being said, popularity of a topic is often higher when you talk in the abstract - only 30% of people have 'quite a lot' or a 'great deal' of confidence in unions as an institution which is what I was remembering[1]. Also in that data - only ~40% of people want to see union influence grow.

Membership is definitely tanking.[2]

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx

[2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2019/union-membership-rate-10-p...

> Also in that data - only ~40% of people want to see union influence grow.

~40% want to see grow to ~30%, giving them ~57% share of people with an opinion.

The confidence stat is silly - I don't have a huge amount of confidence in unions either because of their obvious decline in the last few decades.

Don't really see how you can see the [1] poll and not think that there is clearly a fair bit of support for unions. [2] seems completely irrelevant to popular opinion, which is what we were discussing.

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