NEW YORK – The buyout package Ford Motor Co. is offering 75,000 union workers shows the vestiges of the United Autoworker Union's might: It offers lifetime retirement benefits for workers 50 or older with 10 years of service, and a $100,000 education account for children or spouses.

But the deal also shows what the union has been reduced to: Getting a good deal for its members as they leave their jobs forever.

“On the one hand, it's remarkable that the union is able to negotiate something like this for its workers from a company that's losing so much money and is in so much trouble. So it's a tribute to the power of the union,” said Ross Eisenbrey, the policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a research group tank in Washington. “On the other hand, it portends a future where the union will have less power and strength.”

That future has already arrived, for the UAW and the entire labor movement.

The decrease in union membership has been stark. The UAW had 1.2 million members 20 years ago; it now has less than 600,000. Twenty percent of the United States work force was unionized in 1983. By 2005, union membership had dropped to 12.5 percent of the work force, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The union members who remain are not as bold as their brethren were when unions were larger and more powerful. The number of workers on strike or locked out in labor disputes involving more than 1,000 workers shrank by nearly 90 percent from 1983 to 2005, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Eisenbrey blames unions' decline on unfriendly federal labor policies and a hostile National Labor Relations Board, the independent federal agency charged with reviewing unfair labor practices and certifying workers' votes to join a union.

“The NLRB is the most anti-union board ever,” he said.

Others blame the unions themselves.

“They're not organizing, they're not growing,” said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “They're just trying to cushion the impact on their members.”

The labor movement has been on the defensive for the last decade, he said. “They're unable to deal with globalization issues and nonunion competition. They have no way to solve this.”

The result of weaker unions, especially for blue collar workers, has been stagnating wages, said Eisenbrey.

While foreign automakers have traditionally matched UAW wages for their own non-unionized workers in the U.S., a few are beginning to introduce lower wages at some U.S. plants, paying workers $10 or $12 an hour, down from the average $27 an hour union wage, he said.

At Ford, the packages for departing workers are “the best possible exit deal that could be made,” said Bob Bruno, an associate professor of industrial and labor relations at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

“Nonetheless, it's still a deal with the devil,” he said. “It's dissociating prosperity from work.”

That's nothing new for the auto industry, which has a “jobs bank” where laid-off workers get most of their pay and benefits even when they're not working. Getting rid of the jobs bank isn't part of the buyout package, since it's mandated in the union contract, which expires in Oct. 2007.

The UAW is focused on securing its workers' retirements rather than their future employment because its average member has 20 years' seniority, said Harry Katz, dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Many white collar workers at Ford might envy that focus. Ford said Friday that it would cut an additional 10,000 nonunion salaried jobs.

“There's probably a lot of Ford (union) workers talking with their families, saying 'What should I do? Things aren't going to get any better,'” Chaison said. “At least they get to ask that question. For professional and clerical workers, they just receive an announcement; they don't get to make a choice.”