What went wrong? Why did Unions in America decline so much after 1960?

Controversial, but IMO unions are da bomb.

They're super ingrained in my country. Labor get paid about the same as the average office wage slave, and I'm confident that they have safe working conditions.

Sure it takes 6 months and costs like 8million dollars and to build a small bridge, but meh, at least it wont be built by Mexicans like in the states.

Neo-liberalism also this

Neo-liberalism, outsourcing, a new working class esé

Unions were doomed to become irrelevant and marginalized politically when they decided to attach themselves and their interests closely to one party (the Democrats). Once they identified themselves wholeheartedly with and as Democrats against Republicans, they became a captive audience that would be forced to put up with whatever bullshit trade and labor policies that Democrats proposed (see NAFTA and the TPP for classic examples). What are disgruntled union members going to do, vote for Republicans? They're like American blacks, they get lip-service from Democratic politicians who consistently fuck them over for their corporate buddies and backers.

>TPP
>Just Democrats
Not according to the Senate votes.

Unions are for faggots
Keep your fucking unions you fucking yanks but don't move to the fucking south and then complain that we don't have useless unions just making it harder for people to work

NAFTA wasn't just Democrats either, I'm well aware that both parties stop pretending to fight and come together in bipartisan unity when it comes to fucking Americans over with trade deals and foreign policy. The point is that Democrats do the same shit that Republicans do but because they give lip-service to their constituents somehow that exempts them from criticism.

Ah that is fair senpai, i agree. It is actually amazing to see TPP bring Progressives Democrats and Tea Party Republicans together against the 'moderates'. Really made me consider my moderate views

Why did these things happen though?

Globalization

Structural change in the economy + government shilling agaibst them + thisIt simply wasn't as effective in the new economy.

chayna

A good number of unions were socialist or had ties to organized crime, either of which would make them rival political structures to the government, much like gangs and cartels today. In this way, the government had a motivation to squeeze them out.
And the US Government's movements to establish hegemony over international trade wound up increasing the value of the dollar over what a naive balance-of-trade analysis would suggest it should be, making it harder to export but easier to import.
Public sector unions are still around because they're offshoots of government and they can't really have their work offshored (and the existence of public payroll has a domestic politically strategic dimension to it as well).

The rest of the world entered the marketplace and unions could no longer extract monopoly rents.

>They became irrelevant because they won. Not because they "lost".

This. They "succeeded" in making themselves unemployable.

changes in the workforce created a race to bottom for wage earners. feminism cockblocked the one paycheck family by insisted women have to be taxpayers too and by doubling the workforce, wages get repressed. Mass immigration began in the 60s and had the same influences on wages due to an influx of lowly-educable peoples crowding the bottom ladder.

Free trade makes economies better senpai.
We'll lose low skill jobs but the economy grows enough to create enough back while lowering the cost of products. It also raises working standards and environmental restrictions in other countries.

Why should we arbitrarily protect your shitty job when people in China can do it so much cheaper? Stop getting in the way of the free market

absolutely correct, what happened was that those industries that had strong union presence were eventually destroyed by strikes, because withdrawing labor made the companies unprofitable until demands were met however appeasing these demands did not prevent them from striking again or make the company more profitable, therefore unionized striking killed the industries they were host- it was the advent for contractual based employment and therefore creating a market for labor that was more fluid which increased wages after the 70's and 80's.

>china
>green
because it requires more carbon than to have autarky? Environmentalism is schizophrenic and really isn't aligned properly. Free markets aren't free, China is incredibly nativist and should be met with nativism or be made advantage of. If the post-manual economy meme is going to be real, why do they keep letting in hordes of low skill/wage workers than will delay automation by undercutting machine labor.

Free trade deals like TPP require higher environmental standards. Nativist or not they have to meet the standards or not get the trade deal. However, I'm not sure what type of trade deal the US has with China.

If automation isn't cheaper then the labor pool willing to do it, then why do it?

it still isn't green to burn dinosaurs to ship that shit halfway across the world. It is still more resource intensive to let the third worlders go into full slash and burn industrialization. They can have industries so they stay in their own countries, but they are not going to be as eco-friendly as the west mostly because that sense does not exist there.

Had you somehow managed to not notice the massive propaganda war waged against unions by the capitalist class for the past 40+ years?

Or perhaps the role of 40 years of neoliberal economic policy in undermining the economic security of the working class, in order to engender profound risk aversion to class agitation in any form?

As long as capitalism has to get by on slave labor essentially it has won nothing.

>Muh Economy
Hello Shlomo

>Individuality

Deindustrialization and in many cases corporations would just undermine unions by offering pretty generous compensation.

Unions thrive when employees are dissatisfied. In the post-WW2 economic boom companies were often able to generously compensate employees so that there was little reason to unionize. Wages were rising fast in the 40's & 50's even in non unionized areas.

How so?

>expecting $30 per hour for something someone will do for 70 cents a day.

The free market fixed it.