It won't be long before you hear--because it's part of the framing of Democrats and Republicans alike, and traditional media "analysts" who haven't a clue what they are taking about when it comes to economics--that unions are in trouble because of the "new economy" (which means, to some people, the industrial base is "gone" or we are a "service "economy" now) or "globalization".
But, all of that, as I've written many times before, is rubbish. The real key is politics. Do you live in a society where unions are encouraged, or at least, there is a semblance of a right to unionize under the law? Or do you live in a country where everyone bows down to the wonders of the "free market" and union are considered by the political powers-that-be a nuisance or, at best (in the case of large parts of the Clinton-style Democratic Party), a force to be minimally tolerated mainly when it comes to collecting campaign checks? Now, we have some evidence that this is politics.
The good folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research dug into the facts. The key finding:
Countries strongly identified during the postwar period with social democratic parties – Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland – have generally seen small increases in union coverage and only small decreases in union membership since 1980.
Over the same period, countries typically described as “liberal market economies” – the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and Japan – have generally seen sharp drops in union coverage and membership.
And:
At least at face value, globalization and technological progress do not appear capable of explaining these observed differences, primarily because all of these economies have been subjected to similar sets of forces in both regards...
If anything, countries with a higher level of globalization (by this measure) appear to have a higher level of union coverage.
So, when you hear liberals like Robert Reich and conservatives like the economists at the Chamber of Commerce all mouth nonsense about how the world has changed because of globalization, that "free trade" is good, that you can only get a good job if you are more educated (Reich's particularly foolish drivel) and we have to get used to a service economy--and, thus, those changes are what has hurt unions in the U.S.: it's bogus.
The only difference is politics. For 30 years, we've had a bi-partisan political system that has done very little to stop the unrelenting attack against unions. That's power and politics.