The fact is that unions give people a ticket to the middle class. Big businesses dominate the economy.
For example, the top four domestic airlines collected 41 percent of the industry’s revenue 10 years ago; today they collect 65 percent. It’s the same story in the beer industry, where four firms control nearly 90 percent of the market despite the proliferation of craft brewers. Even in the poultry industry, Tyson’s, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Perdue all but control U.S. production. And three major drug store chains – Walgreens, CVS Health, and Rite Aid – dominate that industry.
Facebook has acquired 67 firms and Amazon 91 firms – some of which were rising, young competitors – without being challenged by regulators. And the number of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange fell by half between 1996 and 2016.
This is a fancy way of saying that the United States has massive income inequality, with the top 1 percent earning 23.8 percent of the national income and controlling 38.6 percent of national wealth.
An individual either applying to work at a big and successful company or trying to move up within it faces a situation in which there is a great inequity in power; there is nothing that even approaches a level playing field. By virtue of their sheer size and market share, they don’t need a new potential employee whereas the applicant needs a job. They have better representation than the employee or the applicant. The applicant can’t force the big business to provide better labor conditions or force them to provide better terms of employment or they can’t do it very easily. A strong union can help level that playing field. If a strong union has the vast majority of the best employees, then they can pressure the big business to offer better labor conditions and to offer better terms of employment. This can enable a person to have a shot at the American dream.
“During the dark days of the Great Depression, unions fought for and won several of the greatest landmark victories that helped build an American Middle Class. In 1935, they played a principal role in creating Social Security, at a time when few workers had pensions to help them in retirement.That same year, the National Labor Relations Act was born, giving workers the right to be represented by a union in collective bargaining with their employer. Workers no longer had to face their boss all alone in asking for a wage increase or some other benefit and risk the possibility of being fired.
The passage of the Wages and Hours Act in 1938 led to the 40-hour workweek, supplanting a system where workers toiled for 60 hours or more in a six day workweek, mostly without overtime pay. (Unions had made the 8-hour workday their top priority for decades.)
Hundreds of thousands of working women and ethnic minorities joined the newly-born Committee for Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1939. They found that unions could protect them against discrimination and harassment and they could win better wages and benefits.”
Unions are responsible for the Pure Food and Drug Act. They helped with the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1965 and OSHA in 1970.
Unions Play a Major Role in Helping America’s Middle Class
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show a steady decline in the middle class’ overall share of income, paralleled by a significant decline in union membership. (see Figure 1) Compared with 1967, when 28.3 percent of American workers belonged to a union and 52.3 percent of national income went to middle-class households, in 2019, only 10.4 percent of workers belonged to a union and the middle class’ share of national income dropped to 45.1 percent.
Unions Help Strengthen the Middle Class and Close Divides
Unions raise wages for all workers. When unionized workers are compared with their nonunionized counterparts, analysis shows that union wages are about 11 percent higher, on average. Union participation has been shown to help address the gender pay gap: Hourly wages for women represented by unions are significantly higher than for nonunionized women. The union wage premium is even larger for some demographic groups, including Black and Hispanic workers and those without a college degree. Indeed, unions have been shown to narrow the racial wealth gap for families of color. From 2010 to 2016, nonwhite families who were union members had a median wealth that was almost five times as large as the median wealth of nonunion nonwhite families. Moreover, a recent study suggested that gaining union membership reduced racial resentment among white workers—something that is particularly relevant in America’s politically fraught environment.
The researchers:
Harvard’s Richard Freeman, Wellesley College’s Eunice Han, and the Center for American Progress’s David Madland and Brendan V. Duke compared data
and they found that
As union membership fell, so did the size of the middle class. Union membership as a proportion of the US workforce declined 8 percentage points from 1985 to 2011, to 11 percent. Meanwhile the number of middle-class households also dropped by eight percentage points, so that by 2011 the middle class comprised 46 percent of the total US population.
In fact, union membership benefits persist and endure across generations
Union membership also appears to have positive effects that persist across generations. The data suggest that the children of union parents tend to achieve higher education levels and be healthier than their nonunion counterparts. Some advantages held especially for less-well-off families whose household heads either didn’t go to college or had a blue-collar occupation: children of union parents without college degrees earned $6,300, or 16 percent, more than those with nonunion parents, even controlling for race, education, occupation, and health.
Steve Schmidt, therefore, is right on the money when he posted this on twitter:
Credit where credit is due. Good on him for supporting unions!