Hello, I'm City Journal editor Brian Anderson.

Thanks for joining us for the Ten Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

The 2007 financial meltdown and the recession that followed dealt a heavy blow to labor

unions in the United States. By 2015, organized labor had shed more than 1.3 million members.

And today, years after a recovery began, unionized jobs only account for about 11% of the U.S. workforce.

What exactly is the future of labor in the United States?

Joining us today on 10 blocks to discuss these developments in the American workforce is my

colleague at City Journal Steve Malanga.

Steve is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal senior editor.

His insightful piece in our summer issue is entitled The New Landscape of American Labor. Steve, thanks for joining

it.

Oh, my pleasure. Overall, labor union membership in the United States took this big hit

after the Great Recession. Some unions have come back a little bit. Others have not. Why is

that and what exactly is going on?

Well, I think you have to break this issue down into public and private sector unions.

And there's been a, I guess, a narrative for a long time that essentially public sector is where the growth is in unionization.

But ironically, since the rebound from the recession began, public sector unions have made very,

very little progress. They're still really down at the low point in terms of losses of membership,

whereas in the private sector, there's been a bit of a rebound. They haven't rebounded

it all the way back to where they were before the recession, and that's

somewhat worrying when you consider that the country does have 5 million more jobs.

We've managed to not only recover the jobs we lost generally, but moved past that.

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