The Labor Wire
June 26, 2018
On the eve of a likely ruling against workers in Janus v. AFSCME, leading economists continue to say unions are the best tool to raise pay and standards for working people. A recent paper by Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu draws on a huge number of data sources and concludes that as unionization rises, inequality falls.
This news comes just as a major study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that the portion of the American workforce who would vote today to join or form a union jumped by an unprecedented 50%, as more and more of us realize that standing together is the best way to get ahead.
Message of the Day
— Join Together to Get Ahead —
When workers use our collective power, we can demand and win better pay and access to health care and retirement security.
Over the past 40 years, as CEOs and their politicians have rigged the economy against working people and made it harder to join together in unions, our economic mobility has suffered.
Workers, especially young people, have begun to realize the importance of solidarity as an answer to the economic worries that keep us up at night, things like student debt, the high cost of housing and low pay.
Economists, too, are turning away from bankrupt free market fantasies and back toward ideas that work, like collective bargaining, which allow us to stand together and get a fair share of what we produce.
This is good news for America’s working people, because we want new economic rules so our families and communities can thrive.
Kitchen Table Economics
68%: That’s how many workers between the ages of 18 and 29 see unions favorably, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.
Source: The Labor Wire, AFL-CIO June 26, 2018