It’s not only good policy. It’s what people want.
By: Edward Smith
August 27, 2019 at 12:41 PM
In downtown Chicago, you’ll find a J.W. Marriott on Adams Street built by union workers and run by union workers. Their wages allow them to own homes, their health care allows them to see a doctor and their pensions promise a secure retirement.
Go only a short distance away to any of a number of other hotels, built by workers who didn’t have a union and run by workers without a union, and you’ll likely find that employees struggle to cover the rent, are more likely to use emergency rooms than visits to the doctor, and have no retirement security.
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Today, more than a third of all workers in the U.S. make less than $15 an hour, according to a National Employment Law Project study based on the Current Population Survey. Nearly 1 in 5 children are living in poverty, about half of older workers have no retirement savings at all, and almost a third of Americans have no health care coverage.
With a union, workers earn on average $9,000 more a year, are a third more likely to have health care coverage and significantly more likely to have a pension. But our nation has gone from a country in which 1 in 3 workers belonged to a union a generation ago to one in which only 1 in 16 private-sector workers belong to a union.
To be sure, global forces have had an impact on America’s working and middle class, but that is too often a generalization and used as an excuse. Global competition and the race to the bottom isn’t the reason that millions of fast-food workers, hotel workers, child care workers, health care workers, and too often construction workers and even teachers live in poverty or are falling behind. The reason isn’t global competition; it’s because they don’t have a union.
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It’s not only good policy-it’s what people want. According to National Opinion Research Corp.’s survey for MIT, nearly half of all workers would join a union if they could-that’s 58 million workers, nearly four times the number who are actually in unions.
People are starting to understand that if you want good wages to raise a family on, if you want good health care, if you want a safe place to work and a pension after a lifetime of work, you need to join a union. It really is that simple, and it’s the economic policy our nation, our businesses and each of us should pursue.