#union density

[driftglazz]

Everything We're Doing Is Not Enough

We can win all of these strikes and still lose the class war. Unless...

“Everything a union does is important. Organizing new members, winning union elections, bargaining contracts, winning strikes…all of these things are meaningful, especially to the workers who are involved in them. But if you are concerned with the big picture—the overall balance of power between capital and labor, and how capital has seized superiority over the past half century, plunging our nation into a crisis of inequality—then you need to focus on the metric that is going to determine the future of that battle. That metric is union density, which is a measure showing what percentage of the American work force are union members. It’s plummeted from a mid-century high of one in three workers down to one in ten today. In the private sector, it’s less than 7%. This is the direct measure of the decline of union power in the context of the whole economy.

We can never honestly say the labor movement is “winning” this overall battle unless union density is going up. By a lot. We would need to double union density just to get back to where we were in the early Reagan era, when things really began going downhill. That means that we need something like 15 or 20 million new union members in America. That is the single most important task of the U.S. labor movement. And even as the #HotLaborSummer hashtags fly around, there is no sign that we are on the path to turning these numbers around.”

Great article. Support strikes. Don’t cross picket lines. Listen to the unions. Start/join a union. Build union density.

[worklabournewsresearch]

Unions Reduce Inequality

“For a period of 40 years, something managed to keep inequality in check in the United States. From 1940 to 1980, the richest 1 percent took home 9 percent of the wealth generated by the economy. Today, just as they did in the 1920s, the top 1 percent grabs about double that share. Surprisingly, the cause of this midcentury “Great Compression” has been largely neglected by economists, with many of them casually dismissing the role of unions.”

“But a groundbreaking new paper, “Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence From Survey Data,” written by the economists Henry Farber, Dan Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu, proposes a different engine for that broad prosperity: unions. The growth of union membership—to a height of nearly 30 percent in 1955, before falling to its current low of 10.7 percent—explains the Great Compression every bit as much as theories about education or any other single factor.”

“Before this paper, economists generally believed that unions largely helped the most skilled and educated workers—i.e., those who already had higher wages. Many economists insisted that unions work by creating insiders who benefit at the expense of outsiders—in other words, those who get in the union receive a premium, while those outside the union are denied opportunities. This theory implies that, since unions merely transfer wealth among workers, they wouldn’t lower inequality overall and might even slow economic growth. But the new paper pushes back on all these notions.”

“These results should end the simplistic tales in which education alone challenges the dominance of the 1 percent. If we want to change whom our economy works for, we must change who gets to exercise power. And this paper makes it clear: There is power in a union.”

The Nation, May 23, 2018: “There Is Power in a Union: A new study overturns economic orthodoxy and shows that unions reduce inequality,” by Mike Konczal

NBER Working Paper No. 24587, May 2018: Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data, by Henry S. Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, Suresh Naidu (95 pages, PDF)

[worklabournewsresearch]

New Studies Show Strong Correlation Between Declining Union Density and Rising Income Inequality

"Two recent studies from the United States and the United Kingdom have added to the growing body of empirical evidence that shows a strong correlation between declining union density and rising income inequality."

"A new research paper prepared by acclaimed U.K. authors and social epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, shows how the weakening of the labour movement during the last quarter of the 20th century has had a significant impact on the ability of working people to influence their standard of living and quality of life."

"The research paper, entitled The importance of the labour movement in tackling inequality, was prepared for the U.K.-based Centre for Labour and Social Studies and was drawn from a more extensive report by the authors entitled, The World We Need, written for the International Labour Organization (ILO)."

"This paper argues that 'we must now recreate a movement with the political and social influence that enabled the former labour movement to achieve the major reductions in inequality during the middle decades of the 20th century. A fairer and more sustainable future is possible.'"

"Meanwhile, a study [entitled Union Strength, Neoliberalism, and Inequality: Contingent Political Analyses of U.S. Income Differences Since 1950] by Dr. David Jacobs, Professor of Sociology, and Lindsey Myers, a doctoral student in sociology, both from Ohio State University, has concluded that a major cause of growing income inequality in the United States has been 'the politically induced decline in the strength of unions.'"

"Their research shows that the role that union decline has played in growing income inequality may actually be larger than many of the favourite explanations offered by economists, such as the education gap in the United States. 'Among their contributions to income equality, unions reduce pay differences within companies and use their influence to lobby on behalf of the working and middle classes,' the researchers say."

National Union of Public and General Employees, July 15, 2014: "New studies show strong correlation between declining union density and rising income inequality"

Centre for Labour and Social Studies, July 2014: "The importance of the labour movement in tackling inequality," by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (16 pages, PDF)

ILO's International Journal of Labour Research, Vol. 6, Issue 1, 2014: "The world we need," by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett [this article begins on page 19] (160 pages, PDF)

American Sociological Review, June 9, 2014: "Union Strength, Neoliberalism, and Inequality: Contingent Political Analyses of U.S. Income Differences since 1950," by David Jacobs and Lindsey Myers

[ricksmithshow]

Today in Labor History: January 25th 1925 in Coppage v. Kansas the US Supreme Court decided it was LEGAL for employees to force potential employees to sign Yellow Dog Contracts saying they would NOT join a union. This lead to increased militancy by both workers and companies eventually forcing the passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932 which strictly FORBID yellow dog contracts.

Last night Prof. Eric Fink came on to talk about the history and how through increased militancy and organizing in the workplace unions forced the eventual passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and the creation of the modern labor movement.