Questions ... Concerns

"Why is there such a huge gap in communications between the unions and their members ... and what can be done about that?"

What do you mean gap? From the top down or the bottom up or both? A lot of legacy unions are oriented to the first one. Some people like that some don't. In any case the local ends up focusing on what the potentially forever in office leadership is interested in. What they're interested in might be very worthy but it's not everything.

A big obvious problem about unions is the perception of lack of choice. Typically there's one and only one union that represents a person. The only way you're getting into another union is to change your job (to a job that also is unionized). This is less and less feasible the older the workers are and vested in their current job. However it's the people who are realizing that they are not going to get promoted and they're not going to really hit the jackpot in the workplace, who find themselves passed over for opportunities and resent it, feel they are discriminated against, are worried they'll just get dumped for younger or offshore/outsourced hires, that are often the most interested in joining a union. Young people who think any minute they're going to be recognized and have great things ahead of them if they just kiss up and work like crazy tend to not be organizable in my experience.

People have to think about why someone would want to join a union besides believing in unions. What else? I think some people want an opportunity to influence their workplace,
other workplaces, society, politics, legislation...things
like that. If all the positions of influence are taken in
the local, there's no opportunities. Let's make more opportunities for unionists to speak. Legacy unions tend to be optimized for the "good followers". The leadership puts out the word about
what the rank and file should do and they should go forth and do that like go door to door to convince people of some thing or picket somewhere or whatever. But that's not necessarily that fulfilling if what a person really wants to do is have a hand in setting policy.

The lack of union choices is extremely restrictive compared to other types of social/beneficial organizations. (If you get on the outs with the president of your local wine tasting club you can very likely find another one because there are no non-compete agreements. :-) I understand the motivation for exclusive representation for collective bargaining with the employer. However for other purposes I think other choices would work. Keep the exclusive bargaining local but allow and encourage the union members and wannabe unionists to join other meta-unions.

When you think about it how easily could the current typically tightly defined local representing just some certain positions at some certain location be very adept at influencing an organizing campaign in a totally different location of a totally different type of worker with a completely different employer? For organizing I think broader labor organizations that cross national union boundaries are the way to go.

In theory we'd have that with AFLCIO because individuals can join and even non-unions can join as I understand it, but AFLCIO has in my experience a single-minded focus on certain goals that it selects such as elections. It's a worthy goal but it's not suited to every unionist. I think we need more meta organizations, ones that individual unionists can join on their own, no national union affiliation permissions required. Yes I'm launching off on the open enrollment thing again :-)