Struggling workers need power of unions

The U.S. workforce comprises 156 million workers — men and women, young and old, of every race and ethnicity. This workforce is the source of our economy’s strength; it is America’s workers who work hard, day in and day out, to generate the goods and services that move our country forward.

But even though these workers devote a huge part of their waking hours to the labor market, the labor market simply does not deliver for many of them. For most of the last four decades, the United States has suffered from rising inequality and anemic wage growth for most workers. While these trends have a number of causes, the common thread that binds them is the degradation of bargaining power of low- and moderate-wage workers.

This suppression of workers’ bargaining power has been so profound that even today’s 3.9 percent unemployment rate has not been enough to spur robust real wage growth.

This situation of weak economic leverage for most workers is not the unfortunate-but-inevitable result of natural trends in technology and global integration. Instead, it’s the product of decades of attacks on workers’ leverage by policymakers, either through direct action or through a failure to keep pace with evolving employer practices that wrest leverage from workers. The result is that the rules governing work in this country are rigged against working people from their first day on the job, leaving low- and moderate-wage workers with little bargaining power to demand their fair share of the growing economic pie.

The best guarantee for a fair workplace for workers is union representation and a collective bargaining agreement. And strong unions improve the wages and working conditions of all working people, since unions help raise standards.

However, as of 2017, only 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers were union members. This disconnect is the result of decades of fierce opposition to unions, with employers exploiting loopholes in outdated labor law to defeat workers’ organizing efforts while corporate lobbyists block attempts at reform.

Policymakers should stand up for U.S. workers and act now to help close the gap. For example, policies should be enacted to ensure that workers who want to form a union are able to do so free from employer intimidation and retaliation.

In addition, policymakers should ban states from passing so-called “right to work” laws, which are intended to undermine private-sector unions by preventing them from being able to require that non-union bargaining-unit members — people that unions are required by law to represent — pay their fair share of the cost of that representation.

We know how significant a force for a fair economy unions are by looking at how much their decline since the 1970s has contributed to inequality between middle- and high-wage workers: union decline can explain onethird of the rise in wage inequality among men and one-fifth of the rise in wage inequality among women from 1973 to 2007.

The kinds of policies described above will help halt and reverse the trend of declining union coverage and rising inequality. These are the types of reforms that are needed to help unrig the system and ensure fairness on the job for working people.