Labor Unions and Inequality Essay

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Labor Studies

Declining Unions and Worker Sentiment

In 2013, a startling recognition was went relatively unnoticed in the news: the American workforce share that was unionized reached a low that had not been seen in 97 years (Lui, 2013). The number of workers who belong to a union is a mere 11.3% of the labor force -- and is still shrinking (Ahlquist, 2012). The public sector, where unionization seemed to have found a solid fit, dropped from a peak of 35% of the labor force in 1950s to an abysmal low of 6.6% (Lui, 2013). Yet, despite the clarion call activated by these grim statistics, Americans seem blase about the decline of unions, taking the position, as Lui (2013) argues that it doesn't really impact them unless they are (or were) union members. The decline of membership in private sector unions in the United States dropped from 34% for men and 16% for women during 1973 to 8% for men and 6% for women in 2007 (Kristal, 2013). During this same period of time, the level of inequality in hourly wages for employees increased by an astonishing 40%. Western and Rosenfeld (2011) attribute this rising wage inequality to the diminished share of wage distribution to union employees.

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In their decomposition of the data, Western and Rosenfeld (2011) argued that dispersion would have been even greater had unions not been able to "institutionalize norms of equity" in locales and industries which were highly unionized (p. 3). A fifth to a third of the increase in wage inequality can be accounted for by the effect of declines in organized labor, which is comparable to the effect education has on the evident stratification of wages in America (Western & Rosenfeld, 2011). Lui s (2013) asserts that the decline in unionization is due to deliberate and systematic "efforts to squeeze unions and disperse their power" (p.1). A factor in this is sort of reverse engineering that has individual workers framing their experiences in an atomized manner and while employers and wealthy elite have collectively organized -- in an increasingly blatant manner -- so as to "rig policy in their favor" (Lui, 2013, p. 1). If workers are not dissatisfied by this situation, Lui (2013) argues, it is because they don't see the relation.

The benefits attributed to unionization is unionization are broad, and can be seen in the lift that occurs to nonunion wages as a means to stave off union.....

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