For many years (and sometimes now), many people treated my optimism about the long-term strength of the labor movement as somewhat delusional, but having been in and around it now for twenty years -- okay, that number makes me feel old -- what's been clear to me is that watching the overall membership numbers year to year was not representative of the long-term planning that would payoff only over time.

It helped that I spent the 1990s in California where some of that innovation was most dramatic in the labor movement-- and the results have been a massive revival of union strength in that state. 200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make. One piece of evidence-- a coming showdown in California between the health care unions and the industry that was literally ten years in the making:

For the first time, nearly 200 contracts are set to expire in the same year, giving [United Healthcare Workers] extraordinary strength at the bargaining table...The plans for this campaign began 10 years ago, with union leaders lining up contract dates to maximize their power as healthcare workers.

So 75,000 hospital and nursing home workers covered by nearly 200 separate union contracts have been moved from fighting individual battles into a united force that can demand better working conditions and better care for their patients. 

Other unions have engaged and succeeded with similar long-term planning, the most notable being hotel workers who in 2006 conducted a Hotel Workers Rising campaign that coordinated hotel contracts in multiple cities to expire the same year to strengthen organizing strength.

One reason unions matter is that they are institutions that determine the livelihood and long-term living standards of workers often over their lifetimes.  This makes them obviously important on economic terms, but it also means that they have a time horizon as institutions that can look towards ten-year or more time horizons for innovation and planning.  Which makes them crucial for any vision of progressive change that requires more them temporary enthusiasms or short-term mobilization.   Not that all unions have the long-term vision needed, but there's been an almost Darwinian evolution in the union movement.  Those unions without long-term vision have shrunk and those with long-term vision have grown and become more and more dominant.

So while the overall numbers of union members have not really grown in the last decade, the proportion of those numbers in unions likely to grow in the future has-- which makes the prospects for the labor movement as a whole far more promising in coming years than they looked a decade ago.