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When discussion turns to the decline of the American manufacturing, labor unions inevitably come in for a full share of criticism.
That sentiment surfaced on Day 1 of the The Elkhart Project, with several readers offering the opinion that unions must be at least partly to blame for the economic mayhem being visited on the city and surrounding communities.
But in the case of Elkhart County, organized labor bears no responsibility for the precipitous decline of the RV industry for a simple reason: All the recreational vehicle manufacturers in the area run non-union shops.
In fact, there are very few union manufacturing jobs in the city at all.
Some of the last union members in Elkhart proper are no longer working. Click here to read msnbc.com reporter Mike Stuckey's report on the striking workers who walked off their jobs at the Vincent Bach musical instrument plant three years ago and were quickly replaced. You also can check out the The Elkhart Truth's report on the three-year anniversary of the strike and a timeline of key events in the dispute.
The Vincent Bach plant and those lost union jobs are among the last vestiges of a once- robust band instrument industry that, at its peak in the 1950s, produced everything from flutes to drums in 20 local factories, according to local historian Paul Thomas. (Click here to see Thomas outline Elkhart's history.)
There's an interesting back story to the absence of unions in Elkhart County and northern Indiana.
Nelson Lichtenstein, director of Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of "State of the Union: A Century of American Labor," told me that the area once had a fairly robust union presence, but that those jobs were some of the first U.S. jobs to be outsourced.
"Elkhart and South Bend and a lot of other small towns in Indiana and Ohio used to be big union towns in the ''30s, ''40s and ''50s," he said. "What happened was that the industries that settled in the small towns tended to be labor-intensive assembly and these were the easiest things to send off to the Deep South or later Mexico. So the unions there really were hit hard and were pretty much gone by the 1970s and ''80s. ⦠The memory of that tends to be forgotten."
The decline of the unions in northern Indiana mirrored a national trend that has seen the percentage of union jobs nationwide fall from a high of 35 percent in 1953 to 12.4 percent in 2008. The latter figure was actually an uptick from 12.1 percent the previous year, but Lichtenstein said he doesn't believe that signals a reversal of organized labor's long-term downward spiral. Click here to see the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
"I would call it a blip, not a trend," he said, adding that much of the growth occurred in the health care, and the service and telecommunications sectors.
Nor does he predict any resurgence for the unions in northern Indiana and elsewhere â unless the recession worsens considerably.
"Unions typically do terrible during recessions because people are worried about their jobs and they don't want to stick their necks out" by organizing or striking, he said. "But if you have something like the Great Depression, where the old traditional elites have been discredited ⦠workers and government say we've got to step into the vacuum. Then you can get a type of unionism and activism."
Lichtenstein said we saw a bit of that was seen in December when workers at a Chicago window and door factory staged a six-day sit-in to demand severance and vacation pay when the plant was suddenly shuttered. The attention generated by the job action prompted Bank of America to agree to pay eight weeks' salary, all accrued vacation pay and two months' paid health care.
"It was classic, like something out of a Frank Capra movie," he said. "The political stars and moons were in such an alignment that their cause became the cause of America, and BofA backed down."
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