No, Unions Aren’t Having a Resurgenceand That’s Good for Workers

Published

2 years ago

May 9, 2024

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Unions are said to be having a moment. The story goes something like this: Helped by a presidential administration that touts itself as the “most pro-union in history,” labor unionsafter decades of declineare winning big victories against anti-union corporations and extracting impressive concessions for their workers. But is it all true?

There has certainly been a lot of union activity. Last year we witnessed a significant increase in strikes and threats of strikes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country lost 16.6 million labor days to work stoppages last year. You have to go all the way back to 2000 to find this level of union disturbance.

In addition, the United Auto Workers (UAW) reached an agreement with Ford that included wage hikes of 25 percent. Similar agreements with Stellantis and General Motors followed. Other unions won contract gains at large employers such as UPS and Hollywood TV and film studios. Then there was the much celebrated UAW victory in a representation election at Volkswagen in Tennessee and progress made at some Starbucks stores.

All the same, talk of a union renaissance might be much ado about nothing. Union membership as a share of wage and salary workers has declined steadily from 28.3 percent in 1967 to an all-time low of 10 percent in 2023. Although the absolute number of union workers has recently risen, it hasn’t kept up with the growth of the total number of American workers.

National Review’s Dominic Pino has been following unions comprehensively. He never forgets to report both their winsand their losses. For instance, workers at a unionized Nissan facility in Somerset, New Jersey, are in the process of decertifying from the UAW. The same happened at various non-Starbucks coffee shops.

These events are in line with the overall trend for UAW, Pino notes, as “membership declined last year to 370,000. It was nearly 400,000 in 2020, and it peaked at 1.5 million in 1970.” To be fair to the labor movement, part of this decline could be because UAW bosses have been pretty corrupt. For instance, National Review reported that “in December 2020, the UAW reached a settlement with the Department of Justice after a yearslong fraud and corruption investigation. More than a dozen top union officials, including two former presidents, were convicted of crimes for embezzlement of workers’ dues.”

It could also be that unions aren’t so much about fighting for the cause of blue collar workers as they used to be. Indeed, 49 percent of union members worked for the government in 2023. Thirty-three percent of public sector employees are in unions, as opposed to just 6 percent of the private sector. In the case of UAW, about 100,000 members work in higher education, including graduate student workers statistically likely to go on to nonblue collar jobs.

I believe public sector unions shouldn’t exist. Taxpayersthe ones paying the bills when government unions successfully negotiate pay and benefits hikesare not adequately represented at the negotiation table. In fact, with their political donations, public sector unions help decide who sits on the other end of that negotiating table.

By contrast, private unions have every right to exist, but this doesn’t mean they’re a good thing on net for workers. A September 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research paper looked at what a unionized workforce does to incentives and investment. While unionized plants pay higher wages and benefits than do nonunionized ones, they also “experience higher rates of closure, reduced investment, and slower employment growth.” In other words, your unionized job might pay more, as long as it doesn’t go awayand good luck finding another like it. The result holds also for partially unionized plants.

Introducing more competition to the private sector union business model could help. For that, my colleague Liya Palagashvili suggests ending the exclusive-representation clause that “provides government-granted monopoly status to a union supported by 51 percent of an employer’s workers, giving it the sole authority to negotiate. This means that if some workers want a different unionfor example a newer one that might raise the bar in terms of what it can offerthey are out of luck.” Today, these workers aren’t allowed to engage in any negotiations with their employers, and they still have to pay the original union’s fees.

The bottom line is that unions aren’t really going through a renaissance. All things considered, their failure is most workers’ gain.

Entertainment

Warner Bros set to rebuff hostile takeover bid – as major backer pulls out of deal

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1 hour ago

December 17, 2025

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Warner Bros set to rebuff hostile takeover bid - as major backer pulls out of deal

Warner Bros is reportedly set to reject a hostile $108bn (£81bn) takeover bid from Paramount, with one of the prospective buyer’s financing partners confirming it’s pulled out of the offer.

A spokesman for investment firm Affinity, owned by Donald Trump‘s son-in-law Jared Kushner, told Sky News’ US partner network NBC News “the dynamics of investment have changed significantly”.

It had backed Paramount’s bid, along with funds from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries.

Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal report the Warner Bros Discovery board are set to advise shareholders to reject Paramount‘s bid – paving the way for Netflix, which had struck a $72bn (£54bn) deal.

If the takeover goes through, it would give the streaming giant the rights to hit Warner franchises like Harry Potter, Batman, and Game Of Thrones, as well an extensive back catalogue of classic films.

Money latest: Oil prices fall to lowest level since 2021

It is the latest twist in a takeover saga where the winner will acquire a huge advantage in the streaming wars.

In June, Warner announced its plan to split into two companies – one for its TV, film studios and HBO Max streaming services, and one for the Discovery element of the business, which primarily comprises legacy TV channels that show cartoons, news, and sports.

Netflix agreed a $27.75 per-share price with the firm, which equates to the $72bn purchase figure deal to secure its film and TV studios, with the deal giving the assets a total value of $82.7bn.

However, Paramount said its offer would pay $30 (£22.50) cash per share, representing $18bn (£13.5bn) more in cash than its rival offered. The offer was made directly to shareholders, asking them to reject Netflix’s deal, in what is known as a hostile takeover.

The Paramount deal would involve rival US news channels CBS and CNN being brought under the same parent company.

The US government will have a big say on the final deal, with the winning company likely facing the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, a federal agency which scrutinises business deals to ensure fair competition.

Business

Christmas cheer for Britain’s biggest chemical plant, but there are two distinct problems

Published

1 hour ago

December 17, 2025

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Christmas cheer for Britain's biggest chemical plant, but there are two distinct problems

You’ve doubtless heard of the National Grid, the network of pylons and electricity infrastructure ensuring the country is supplied with power. You’re probably aware that there is a similar national network of gas pipelines sending methane into millions of our boilers.

But far fewer people, even among the infrastructure cognoscenti, are even faintly familiar with the UK Ethylene Pipeline System. Yet this pipeline network, obscure as it might be, is one of the critical parts of Britain’s industrial infrastructure. And it’s also a useful clue to help explain why the government has just announced it’s spending more than £120m to bail out the chemical plant at Grangemouth in Scotland.

Ethylene is one of those precursor chemicals essential for the manufacture of all sorts of everyday products. React it with terephthalic acid and you end up with polyester. Combine it with chlorine and you end up with PVC. And when you polymerise ethylene itself you end up with polyethylene – the most important plastic in the world.

Why Grangemouth matters

Ethylene is, in short, a very big deal. Hence, why, many years ago, a pipeline was built to ensure Britain’s various chemical plants would have a reliable supply of the stuff. The pipes connected the key nodes in Britain’s chemicals infrastructure: the plants in the north of Cheshire, which derived chemicals from salt, the vast Wilton petrochemical plant in Teesside and, up in Scotland, the most important point in the network – Grangemouth.

The refinery would suck in oil and gas from the North Sea and turn it into ethane, which it would then “crack”, an energy-hungry process that involves heating it up to phenomenally high temperatures. Some of that ethylene would be used on site, but large volumes would also be sent down the pipeline. It would be pumped down to Runcorn, where the old ICI chlor-alkali plant, now owned by INEOS, would use it to make PVC. It would be sent to Wilton, where it would be turned into polyethylene and polyester.

That’s the first important thing to grasp about this network – it is essential for the operation of a whole series of plants, many of them run by entirely different companies.

The second key thing to note is that, after the closure of the cracker at Wilton (now owned by Saudi company Sabic) and the ExxonMobil plant at Mossmorran in Fife, Grangemouth is the last plant standing. While the refinery no longer uses North Sea oil and gas, instead shipping in ethane from the US, it still makes its own ethylene.

So when INEOS began consulting on plans to close that ethylene cracker, officials down south in Westminster began to panic. The problem wasn’t just the 500 or so jobs that might have been lost in Grangemouth. It was the domino effect that would feed throughout the sector. All of a sudden, all those plants at the other ends of the pipeline would be affected too. In practice, the closure might have eventuated in more than a thousand job losses – maybe more.

What’s happening now?

All of which helps explain the news today – that the Department for Business and Trade is putting more than £120m of taxpayer money into the site. The bailout (it’s hard to see it as anything but) is not the first. The government has also put hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money into British Steel, which it quasi-nationalised earlier this year, not to mention extra cash into Tata Steel at Port Talbot and loan guarantees to help Jaguar Land Rover after it faced an unprecedented cyber attack.

But while this package will undoubtedly provide Christmas cheer here in Grangemouth today, the government is left facing two distinct problems.

Reactive rather than strategic

The first is that for all that the chancellor and business secretary (who are themselves planning to visit Grangemouth today) are keen to pitch this latest move as a coherent part of their industrial strategy, it’s hard not to see it as something else. Far from appearing strategic, instead they seem reactive. To the extent that they have a coherent industrial strategy, it mostly seems to involve forking out public money when a given plant is close to closure. If they weren’t already, Britain’s industrialists will today be wondering to themselves: what would it take to get ourselves some of this money in future?

The crisis continues

The second issue is that the Grangemouth bailout is very unlikely to end the crisis spreading across Britain’s chemicals sector. A series of plants – some prominent, others less so – have closed in the past few years. The chemicals sector – once one of the most important in the economy – has seen its economic output drop by more than 20% in the past three years alone.

This is not just a UK-specific story. Something similar is happening across much of Europe. But for many chemicals companies, it simply doesn’t add up to invest and build in the UK any more – a product in part of regulations and in part of high energy costs. In short, this story isn’t over yet. There will be more twists and turns to come.

Sports

Ex-Bama coach Saban buys stake in NHL’s Preds

Published

2 hours ago

December 17, 2025

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Ex-Bama coach Saban buys stake in NHL's Preds

ESPN News Services

Dec 16, 2025, 02:50 PM ET

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Former Alabama football coach and current ESPN college football analyst Nick Saban has purchased a minority stake in the NHL’s Nashville Predators.

Predators chairman and majority owner Bill Haslam announced Tuesday the purchase made by Dream Sports Ventures LLC, an entity controlled by Saban and business partner Joe Agresti.

“Although I am now retired as a coach, I still possess a competitive nature and a great passion for sports,” Saban said in a statement released by the Predators. “Being involved in a sports team in Nashville has always been a goal and the opportunity to partner in the Predators with a class act like Bill Haslam created the perfect scenario for us. The Preds are a great organization with a fantastic brand, and we are excited to be part of the future success of the franchise.”

Saban and Agresti are partners in the Dream Motor Group that features 10 car dealerships, including two in Nashville. They’re partners in several other business ventures as well.

Saban stepped down as Alabama’s coach after the 2023 season. He posted a 297-71-1 record in 28 years as a coach and won seven national titles — one at LSU and six at Alabama.

Haslam was governor of Tennessee from 2011-19. He became chairman of the Predators on July 1, 2024, and took over as majority owner of the franchise on July 3 of this year.

Information from The Associated Press contributed to this report.