Thanks, poemless.  I never really left.  I've been lurking.  Most of the non-Russia related topics (I mean the highly-specific, internal EU laws and rules) here just don't interest me enough to post about, but for some reason I do read most of them ;-)

Yes, that's right. FWIW, my take on that is that US organized labor became rather conservative after the mid-1950s and failed to put much effort into organizing new workers.

I was involved in a graduate student union that was an AFL-CIO affiliate for a while.  Unsurprisingly, it was fairly activist, and got aggresively involved in various organizing drives around the campus.  The narrative I picked up in that environment is that in the post-war period the major American unions more or less stopped organizing in either existing or new sectors of the economy, and let the structures in already-unionized sectors more or less wither away.  Instead of an organization of the members and for the members, it became more and more oriented towards using member fees to support a large professional caste, who dispensed services from upon high to a largely disconnected membership.  As professional managers, they had a disturbing tendency to be closer to the employers than the employees they represented, and oftentimes chose strategy and tactics that reflected this closeness, further driving their members away from any sort of involvement or identification with the union.

One common result was that the large national unions focused the majority of their attention upon legislation in Washington DC, and very little of their attention on the companies for which their members worked or on organizing new members.

That is a dangerously complacent model, and unions suffered as a result.  When American business started its efforts to end unions in America, the professionalized unions were too weak on the ground to really fight back.

It is true that a union cannot really do much if a company moves all of its operations abroad.  However, there is a lot that unions could have done which went un-done because they were too weak, or simply decided not to.

As far as the larger effect of unionization on an industry or economy as a whole, the prevailing wisdom was that substantial unionization, even in the range of 30% or 40%, is enough to dramatically improve the working conditions of everybody in the industry.  The example cited was Los Vegas casino workers, where because of a fairly substantial union presence, most workers get pay and benefits equivalent to union members.

Not again but still.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

Yes, I think what is needed to fix it are a couple of things, essentially a global version of the US New Deal in terms of regulating international labor and financial markets.

One is international labor standards, which could be anything from a global right to join a labor union to a global minimum wage adjusted for a country's level of productivity along with standards of health and safety. This would boost global demand by helping ensure that wages rise with labor productivity.

The other is to reform international financial institutions, especially the IMF, to make them more growth-oriented along the lines originally proposed by Keynes back in the 1940s.

Keynes envisioned a much better-funded institution [IMF] . . . Keynes's institution would have been capable of taking action on a larger scale. . . .  Keynes saw a balance of payments imbalance as a problem for both surplus and deficit countries, both of which needed to be encouraged to change their policies [as opposed to] the problem of the country running the deficit alone.

There's more:

[Keynes's] own designs for the World Bank and IMF were decidedly more friendly to the poor and the indebted than to wealthy creditors. He wanted the two new multilateral agencies -- largely free of domination by the United States or anyone else -- to serve as "global banks" and "global treasuries." At the same time, he wanted them to be able to issue their own "currency" (called the "bancor") in order to provide liquidity in times of crisis and for long-term growth, and to do so at levels beyond those that private capital markets would provide. In Keynes's plan, moreover, exchange rates were to be managed by governments, not 28-year-old traders staring at computer screens; commodity prices were to be stabilized by publicly controlled buffer stocks; and trade policy was to be shaped by domestic concerns for equality, democratic sovereignty, and stable growth, not by a free-trade-whatever-the-cost ideology. His model was, in essence, a generously liberal version of domestic Keynesianism, rewritten for the world.

The details can be debated, but essentially the problem is to ensure that global aggregate demand keeps up with global supply, which is what Keynesian economics is all about.

Regarding what to do next, the auto industry might be a good area for analysis.  Of Toyota's 12 plants in the US, 9 are not unionized.  Of course all 77 of the GM plants are unionized.  

My understanding is that labor rates are slightly lower at Toyota, 10+%.  Work rules are far more flexible, allowing workers to move among different tasks, so that balancing skills across the plant is more efficient.  The GM health care program for workers is nothing like healthcare programs for other companies today, where healthcare costs are shared between employees and employers, with workers more aware of the cost of healthcare, and incented to make some economic decisions in conjunction with health decisions--generic versus brand drugs for example.  My guess is that Toyota's health care program looks much more like today's healthcare programs than the legacy auto industry.  I agree that the healthcare costs per car are certainly different, it would be interesting to see how much is due to the differnece in the programs versus the age of the work force--but I would imagine your point on age is very relevant.

Indeed most of the strikes in my company were so-called warning strikes, sometimes taking just hours (but those were rush-hours), and they usually worked. (Then again, they were never really ambitious.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}