


(from hotair.com)The SEIU’s Andy Stern may still get his weekly tete-a-tete with the President’s staff, and the industry he represents may share something in common with the President besides a radical agenda. A new poll by Pew Research shows that the labor movement’s popularity among Americans has plummeted over the last three years. In January 2007, unions had a favorability gap of 27 points with a solid majority (58%) approving of them. Today, that advantage has entirely dissipated.
Another ominous note is the performance among seniors. These voters remember the heyday of unions, when they existed to actually protect workers from abuses. Three years ago, seniors overwhelmingly approved of unions, 60/28. Today, they overwhelmingly disapprove, 29/51. The 31-point drop in approval is the worst among the demographics, and it represents a staggering 54-point reversal in the gap.
None of this should be terribly surprising. As mentioned earlier, the unions have enjoyed remarkable access to Congress and the White House, and has been intimately involved in the Democratic agenda. Not only have they twisted arms in remarkably public fashion to get themselves tax breaks in the ObamaCare bill, they’ve campaigned for the last couple of years to eliminate the secret ballot and allow for similar arm-twisting in workplaces across America to force workers to pay union dues. They have become much more about themselves and the Democratic Party than about the workers, which is why the only people supporting them are Democrats — and even they have begun to have second thoughts.