With fewer than one in seven private sector workers unionised (one of the lowest levels in Europe), the power balance between corporations and the workforce is seriously out of line.
With McDonald's defined as a joint employer, unions could press for greater recognition instead of having to unionise one franchise at a time.
Second, there's general agreement that unionisation in a sector depresses long-term investment in firms in that sector, that unionised firms are less adaptive than non-unionised ones, and that this is what has led to declining unionisation.
So the auto and steel industries shifted factories to right-to-work states, leading to the tautological result trumpeted in papers like this one that unionised areas have lower rates of investment than non-unionised ones.
"It all depends if we manage to unionise," said one current Ryanair pilot.
Pay scales in unionised firms tend to be flatter than in non-unionised ones.
Clean-energy firms, not to mention all manner of companies that simply want more clarity about the future, are keen to see a climate bill passed.There are even splits over the Employee Free Choice Bill, which aims to increase union membership (and reduce employees' freedom of choice) by replacing secret ballots of workers about whether they should unionise with public ones.
Bosses are no longer easily intimidated; more small firms, which tend not to be unionised, are being bred than big ones; and the economy's gravity is shifting geographically to the union-hostile South and West, and sectorally from manufacturing, the traditional stronghold of the unions, to service industries which think them irrelevant.Moreover, what do strikers win?
"It's not so unionised, it's no longer a one-party state," he says.
Once they are in contact and they have decided to work with one voice, they have effectively unionised and the company is screwed," she said.
