The past six months has been bad for unions. Two bad decisions that shot themselves in the foot. Both problems started about the same time.
First, a group of unions decided to support front-running Democratic candidate Gov. John Dean with money and people. Another group of powerful unions decided to support their loyal friend of twenty years, Rep. Dick Gephardt, in the Iowa caucuses where he was believed to have a very good chance, having run well there before.
At about the same time a group of grocery store unions in Southern California decided to get locked-out on the assumption that their membership would be opposed to a two-tier hiring policy and cutbacks in health insurance coverage that the grocery chains demanded.
The enemy of the unions, in both cases, was a major piece of legislation that the union movement never noticed and never opposed.
I'll explain as we go along, because the route to union disaster is roundabout.
The unions did fail -- miserably. Both of the Democratic primary campaigns failed. Gov. Dean failed immediately, going from front-runner with support from Al Gore, to third place, near the bottom. Rep. Gephardt was promptly forced out of the race with his 2-3% showing in the race in Iowa where union manpower should have been important.
In California, the unions quickly ran out of in-house strike funds and after nearly three months completely folded to an agreement that had been offered to them before the strike began.
It's important to recognize what unions are today. They are 70% government employees whose members are protected by legally mandated arbitration laws. Everywhere else their membership has been shrinking for forty-five straight years. 
So what happened to finish off the unions? The bills that did the trick were the farm support bills.
Farming in the U.S. is a losing proposition. Even big farms and ranches would lose money without farm subsidies. Farm subsidies have been providing 100% of farm profits for the past thirty years. The amount of profit has averaged around $30 billion for all of farming, or $30,000 in profit per active farmer each year.
Where does that farm subsidy money go?
Farmers have never had any place to spend their money. When they have money, they are cash rich. Farmers, 100 years ago, created Sears and Roebuck with their demand. Then they created the Mall of America, the largest mall on the planet, where farmers still go to spend a week or a weekend shopping. Farmers also created Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer on the planet. And the farm bills turned the farmers of America into conservative red state Republicans.
The connection of farm subsidies and union failure is clear.
Rep. Gephardt was defeated in Iowa, a farm state. Even the Democrats in the primary couldn’t see a union loyalist as their friend. Thirty years of farm exports and farm subsidies, granted by the Senate, trump unions and a protectionist Congressman.
The Southern California grocery chains that locked-out the unions over the chains' desperate need to cut rapidly rising health insurance costs, were public about their need to compete with non-union Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is subsidized in significant amounts by farm subsidies in the thousands of rural outlets Wal-Mart operates.
Unions were defeated in Iowa and Southern California by Senate-granted farm subsidies of $30 billion a year.
Unions can never recover. Unions don’t have popular support and they can’t provide manpower at the polls. Because 70% of their membership are employed by the government their members are not a group easily roused to work in campaigns.
Even when government union jobs were on the line in November 2002, when the vital union issue was a Homeland Security agency without union protection, the unions lost badly to a Republican off-year electoral rout.