Unions raise living standards
The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Service Employees International Union declined to provide an opposing view. The AFL-CIO did not respond to requests.
Jake Rosenfeld, The Seattle Times: “Whether fighting for economic justice for low-income, non-union workers or seeking generous contracts for their own members, unions at their best work to raise the living standards for the vast majority of working Americans. It is hard to imagine the minimum-wage campaign succeeding in Seattle without the backing of organized labor. It would be hard to imagine a reversal of rising economic disparities across the nation absent a revitalized labor movement.”
Richard Berman, The Wall Street Journal: “The real reason (unions support hiking the minimum wage) is that some unions and their members directly benefit from minimum-wage increases — even when nary a union member actually makes the minimum wage ... The data indicate that a number of unions in the service, retail and hospitality industries peg their base-line wages to the minimum wage.”
Matthew Yglesias, Vox: “The basic notion is that a work agreement reached through a collective bargaining process should be judged presumptively fair and non-exploitative in a way that isn’t true for individual bargaining alone. That’s obviously not an idea everyone accepts. But it’s very close to the core of what labor unions are all about.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg: “The political power of the minimum wage comes from its appeal to Americans’ values. It doesn’t come from their self-interest: Most voters don’t benefit from it directly. They favor raising the minimum wage because it seems like a way of giving people a leg up and making the economy fairer. Opposition is politically dangerous because it signals indifference to those goals. ... Republicans can mitigate the political harm ( by finding) different ways to associate themselves with those goals.”
Marcos Breton, The Sacramento Bee: “Sacramento shouldn’t be ... jumping on the minimum-wage bandwagon without examining what unprecedented wage hikes might do to the city’s recovering economy.”