It's been a grim Labour Day season for the union movement. In the run up to the weekend, unions in Canada and the United States tried hard to extract some positive energy from the annual holiday that was founded by union activists more than 130 years ago. Trying hardest was the U.S. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as it promoted a national strike against McDonalds and other fast food chains, demanding $15 an hour to replace current wages of about $8 an hour.

The headlines looked good. “Fast-Food Strikes Expand Across U.S. to 50 states,” said Bloomberg News. Salon.com called it the “largest fast food strike ever.” But on the ground the union effort failed to stop one hamburger from being flipped as workers kept working and 99% of fast-food consumers never noticed, which helps explain why only 7% of private-sector workers in America are unionized.

Canada’s unions have a larger 17% share of the nation’s private sector workers, but that number has been in steady decline, forcing major union consolidation (see graph). At a convention on Saturday, former members of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union elected the first president of Unifor, their new merged union. After the vote, the new president — former CAW executive Jerry Dias — pumped up the rhetoric, taking aim at the Harper Conservatives and promising to change the national agenda. “Unifor is here because it’s time to stop playing defence and it’s time we started to play offence.”

Meanwhile, just before the Labour Day weekend, two other Canadian unions joined forces. The small and struggling Telecommunications Workers Union was gobbled up by Leo Gerard’s United Steelworkers — another indicator that the private-sector union movement is losing ground and clout. Post-merger, the new Unifor union and the expanded Steelworkers operation will collectively account for less than 600,000 workers or barely 4% of the 15-million total Canadian workforce and less than 7% of the private sector workforce.

In the public sector, unions are holding their own. Across Canada, about 73% of 3.4-million government workers are unionized, a number that’s unchanged over the last 25 years. Unions therefore seem to have something of a hammerlock on the public sector, despite growing awareness among many Canadians that government workers enjoy wages and benefits, including major pension plans that often seem out of line with the Canadian majority.

Mergers won’t solve the union crisis. To help revive itself, the union movement in Canada and the United States has been promoting another campaign aimed at rebranding unions and high wages as an economic growth strategy. The idea, imported from the same American unions that are now attempting to organize McDonalds and other fast food chains, is to portray unions as all-round wealth creators. The slogan: “The Union Advantage.”

Ken Georgetti, head of the Canadian Labour Congress, trumpeted the union advantage in a recent commentary: “Average unionized workers in Canada earn $4.97 an hour more than do other, non-union workers. That extra money in the pockets of the country’s 4.67-million unionized employees translates into an added $785.8 million every week in the national economy.”