The existing per capita distribution of members' dues should be reexamined in this light. Under current arrangements, shares of local union members' dues go to their national union and the regional body and to local, state and the national federations of labor. Financial resources should be redirected to the local union or regional level to facilitate organizing and activism. Internal fiscal controls should be tightened. The resulting administrative bureaucracy will be tolerable if there are tighter fiscal controls and financial accountability to members increases.
Unions also have to come to grips with the fact that the expectations of the workforce have changed.
After the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, they want a larger share, and they want it now. They have bought into the idea of meritocracy at work and its decollectivizing effects. They go home to their privatized worlds of TV and Internet surfing. They work as individual contractors and in all sorts of contingent work arrangements. They would rather move across town than fight to change the world they live in.