Hacker News Reader

Comment by MiroF | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com