Government, Trucking Fields Lead : County’s Unions Register 12% Gain Over Two Years

Fed mainly by increased unionization of government employees and trucking and warehousing workers, Orange County’s labor union rolls swelled by 12.2% between mid-1983 and mid-1985, according to a biennial study just released by the state Employment Development Department.

Despite the jump in raw numbers, however, unionized workers have declined as a percentage of the county’s increasingly white-collar work force, the EDD study shows.

In July, 1983, the study tallied 125,000 union members in the county, accounting for 14.4% of non-farm wage and salary earners. The total number jumped to 140,200 in July, 1985, but that accounted for only 14% of the county’s non-farm wage and salary earners, according to EDD analyst Alta Yetter Gale.

In both years, the county’s so-called unionization rate was the lowest of any metropolitan area in the state.

Mary Yount, secretary-treasurer of the Central Labor Council of Orange County, the AFL-CIO governing body, said that she agrees with the study’s finding that the total number of union members has increased but believes that it understates the overall impact of the union organizing drives that have been conducted in recent years.

The EDD figures, she said, do not exclude from the total labor force those people who cannot belong to unions because they are in supervisory positions--a significant portion of the county’s labor pool.

Orange County also has a high concentration of people in the financial-services industries, and “those types are difficult to organize anywhere,” Yount said.

“The county also has the reputation of being a non-union area. A lot of companies come here for that reason, and they are more willing to fight an organizing drive” because of their strong anti-union positions, she added.

Says Numbers Are Old

In addition, Yount said, the EDD numbers are 18 months old, and “we have seen much more of an increase (in union membership) in the last 18 months” than in the period contained in the study.

The EDD report, for example, says that construction workers, once among the most heavily unionized labor force in the county, have been dropping out of their unions--or refusing to join in the first place--in massive numbers. Only 52% of the county’s construction workers, the report says, belonged to unions in July, 1985, contrasted with 89.3% two years earlier.

But Yount maintains that construction workers have been coming back to their unions in the past year as economic problems that plagued many residential builders have subsided.

When almost 90% of the county’s construction workers were union members in 1983, there were only 31,690 employees in that industry. In 1985, when the percentage belonging to unions had dropped to 52%, there were 51,200 construction workers included in EDD’s total.

Many of those who joined the construction trades during the intervening two years came in at a time of fierce competition, when contractors were using the so-called double-breasted system to set up non-union companies to bid on most jobs while reserving their union shops only for the limited number of jobs that required union labor as part of the master contract.

Now that the construction trades are enjoying a new boom, the non-union contractors are able to take advantage of the competitive rates they established during the lean years of the early 1980s to continue landing jobs.

But Yount said unions have recognized what is happening and in the past 18 months have boosted recruitment drives among non-union construction workers.

Government employment, however, is where the county’s unions have made the most significant gains.

In the 1983 study, Yetter Gale reported that only 12,200 government employees, or 13% of the 93,850 government workers at the time, were unionized.

By mid-1985, however, the total belonging to labor unions had climbed to 22,300, or 23% of a total payroll of 97,000.

Transportation and warehousing, the labor area traditionally represented by the Teamsters Union, also posted a strong gain in union members, from 7,400 in 1983 to 12,300 last year, the EDD report says.

The largest single decline in a significant industry group was the 17.1% drop recorded for the wholesale and retail trades group, where union membership dropped from 31,500 in 1983 to 26,100 in 1985.

Yount said the decline was prompted in large part because “we are seeing a lot of plant closures in Orange County that affects wholesale and retail unionization.” She was referring specifically to the closure of the Gemco chain.