Hence, these younger workers have little knowledge of, and do not particularly care about, unions. More than 70 percent of the current civilian labor force is under the age of Today's workers also tend to be highly mobile, better educated, and often in white-collar or new-collar computer, technical, etc. They care about wages, but many care more about such issues as career advancement, day care, quality of life on the job, developing new skills, and having some say in how their jobs are done.
Workers of today also tend to be more sympathetic to business. Many came of age during the oil-shocks of the mids, the back-to-back recessions that followed, and the trade wars. This has led them to appreciate the importance of business in creating jobs and has made them desire unions that are willing to cooperate with management rather than confront it.
The downside of unions, from an economic perspective, is that they make it harder for companies to grow and hire more workers. The decline of unions may be one of the reasons that the US now has both a booming job market and rising inequality. One of the main policy responses to falling union membership among progressive-leaning politicians has been to push for higher minimum wages. The logic is that if workers at companies are not able to bargain for higher pay, perhaps the better strategy is a government mandate.
It seems to be working. Although unionization rates will probably keep falling, minimum wages have been rising. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. In addition, the occupations and industries where union participation has historically been highest have shrunk.
Those sectors have declined," says Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at the ILR School at Cornell University.
Growth has been in the high tech sector, in the service sector and in jobs that are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act; like independent contractors and leased workers and domestic workers. But new interest in labor unions among workers in growing industries such as tech and media may be revitalizing growth, and people like Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a long-time union member and co-founder of the House's Labor Caucus remain optimistic that union enrollment will rise in and beyond.
Skip Navigation. But unions also contribute to reducing wage inequality. Among unionized employees, unions raise wages for lower earners and suppress some wages of higher earners, with the effect that there is overall less disparity in wages. Even more notably, unions also reduce broader income inequality. If unionization had remained constant between the early s and , income inequality may have risen by up to one third less than it actually did.
Where unions exist, they can help increase wages among non-union employees because employers pay higher wages to prevent workers from unionizing. They can also help create norms regarding fair pay and equality that spillover into non-union workplaces. Employer resistance to unionization of their workers is a key factor in the decline of unions. Another possibility is allowing sectoral bargaining, in which employees and employers negotiate at the industry level.
This model, popular in many other countries, increases the number of employees who benefit from collective bargaining although it does not necessarily increase the number who belong to unions.
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