Government Work.(A)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Unions: Now that organized labor has settled into the public sector, it's less of a counterweight to private capital and more of a thorn in the taxpayer's side.

A lot of history goes into Labor Day, along with a touch of irony. The holiday was conceived more than a century ago by workers who were fighting to organize for better wages and a better life. But the same labor movement that invented this delightful day off in the fading glow of late summer has itself been fading -- with one notable exception.

These days, most American workers to whom this day is dedicated have no union ties.

Earlier this year, the Labor Department reported that union membership slipped to 13.2% of all wage-and-salary workers in 2002, down from 20.1% in 1983.

The numbers for the non-government work force are even more striking. In 2002, only 8.5% of those working in the private sector were union members. This is a huge drop from the levels of labor's heyday, when unions were powerful forces in American industry.

It's a different story on the government side. There, nearly four in 10 workers are union members (37.5%, according to federal figures for 2002). Public employees are still a minority of union members overall, but they're gaining on their private sector counterparts. In 2001, the private-public split was 56-44; in 2002, it was 54-46.

The national labor leadership reflects this trend. The head of ...