The numbers drive the policies, but they extend beyond opposing unions. They help explain GOP virulence against government workers, because with the decline in private sector unions, the public sector is a major source of unionized workers. GOP governors and legislators have driven the decline in state workers that continues to drag down the employment numbers. While private sector employment grows, it is offset every month by lost public sector jobs.
There are other ramifications that drive other policies. Unions (far more than entrepreneurial business) have provided support for newcomers who start low in the labor market to work their way into the middle class. Unions were crucial to the generations of immigrants who came to America in the first half of the 20th century--like the ones extolled by GOPer convention speakers. They were Polish, Italian, Irish, etc. They were the ones who sacrificed, who bled, in the battle to unionize major industries, and eventually they were the ones who benefited--along with their descendants now in suburbia.
GOPers continue to oppose unions even in those older industries (opposition that President Eisenhower said in the 1950s was "stupid") and even rolling back hard-won union rights and programs.
But those industries have declined, and unions have declined for jobs now held by those former ethnics--now simply identified and self-identified as white people. Unions have again become crucial to those comparatively fewer workers who start at the bottom, who now come from different countries, and are classified racially as African American, Latino and Asian.
There's another component to this. While many unions championed civil rights, and equal hiring rights, it has been the public sector that has provided jobs without prejudice based on race, gender or partner preference. That's partly because of Civil Service and other means that make qualifications strictly based on exam results or other measures of merit. But it also because those public sector unions are the most diversified, with a higher proportion of women and racial and other minorities.
So in attacking immigrants (meaning principally Latinos), attacking women's rights and harking back to a time when women were necessarily more dependent, and even attacking public education itself, the GOP is trying to deny the Democrats the means to sustain itself as a party, financially and otherwise, while appeasing its incredibly shrinking base.
Longterm it's a losing strategy, unless the GOP can lock up the process now, with unlimited money and official voter suppression. In the now, it is cruel, biased, cynical and ultimately harmful not only to the people under attack, but to the country as a whole, and the country's future.
In pursuing these policies, the GOP is helping to drive U.S. education, health care, income mobility, etc. down further and further in the ranks of the industrialized nations. The U.S. is losing competitive ground because of this, and because the GOP privileges its fossils and their fossil fuel industries over the industries of the future that other countries are very busy developing, and creating a perhaps insurmountable lead. By going so far as to deny the science of the climate crisis, GOPers are wounding the world's future--which they may be surprised to learn necessarily includes the U.S.--and specifically destroying this country's unique ability to lead, or even to participate.
All so some billionaires can hug their money tighter, pile it higher, and provide themselves with fancier graves.
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