Why we fight: to save the American dream

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Wisconsin's unions are on the front lines today fighting the battle against Tea-Publican tyranny and their war against America's middle class. They are fighting to save the American dream for all of us. We stand with our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin.

Karla Walter, Senior Policy Analyst at Think Progress, and David Madland, Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, recently posted this Report: As Union Membership Rates Decrease, Middle Class Incomes Shrink | ThinkProgress:

Union membership is at record lows and is likely to drop even further tomorrow when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces new figures for 2010. Critics claim that unions are not important to the modern economy — with only 12 percent of workers currently unionized — but the truth is that if you care about the middle class, you need to care about unions.

The middle class is markedly stronger when workers join together in unions. As the chart below demonstrates, the sharp decline over the past 40 years in the percentage of workers organized in unions has been associated with an equally sharp drop in the share of the nation’s income going to the middle class — those in the second, third and forth income quintiles*:

 
The power of unions to create prosperity for working families is well recognized: Organized labor is one of the few voices for the economic interests of the middle class in our government. Unions were key to creating and protecting the social safety net (including Social Security and Medicare) and winning major legislative victories for working families such as the Equal Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and — most recently — the Affordable Care Act.

And unions ensure that workers are paid fair wages. Unionized workers today make significantly more on than their non-union counterparts — about $2.50 more per hour than an otherwise comparable worker in the typical state according to a recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

When unions were stronger in the middle part of the last century, American workers wages rose as they became increasingly more productive. But today, as union strength has decreased, this link has broken down: even though American workers grow increasingly more productive, their wages have stagnated. At the same time, more and more income has become concentrated at the very top of the income scale.

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos recently posted about this follow-up study. Declining union membership contributes to rising income inequality, study finds:

We can know that these two things happened in the same time period in a way that shows up as a startlingly similar line on a graph, but they might be entirely unrelated, or both attributable to some other unmapped cause. [Above Chart]

In this case, though, a new study bolsters the strong implication of that graph: Declining union membership is actually responsible for a significant part of the growth in income inequality. The (paywalled) study, by sociologists Bruce Western of Harvard and Jake Rosenfeld of the University of Washington, uses some terrifically frightening statistics to make this case.

Western explains that:

"Most researchers studying wage inequality have focused on the effects of educational stratification—pay differences based on level of education—and have generally under-emphasized the impact of unions."

Some excerpts from the study, which is in the American Sociological Review 76(4), omitting all the stuff about decomposition and reweighting and so on:

• We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions' effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education. (513)
• [D]eunionization's effects on inequality are only half as large as education's effects for women, but union and education effects are equally large for men. (528)
• [We argue] that unions not only equalize union members' wages, they also equalize the nonunion wage distribution by threatening union organization and buttressing norms for fair pay. We found strong evidence that unionization rates in detailed industries for geographic regions are positively associated with wage equality among nonunion workers. (532)
• The decline of U.S. labor and the associated increase in wage inequality signaled the deterioration of the labor market as a political institution. Workers became less connected to each other in their organizational lives and less connected in their economic fortunes. (533)

In other words, when Republicans and their corporate masters go after unions, they're not just coming for non-union workers next, they're already doing it. . .

This is just the most recent study in a series of studies over the years that have demonstrated a link between declining union membership and rising income inequality. The loss of bargaining power over wages and benefits leads to a redistribution of wealth upwards, and a declining standard of living for the American middle class.