How to fight back against the middle-class squeeze? Form a union, says new study

With wages for most workers failing to keep up with the cost of living, families in Silicon Valley, California and throughout the nation are feeling the "middle-class squeeze": working hard but unable to make ends meet.

Perhaps the most at risk are families who have been squeezed right out of the middle class -- trapped in the low-wage, dead-end jobs that are increasingly becoming the only jobs available (a recent analysis concluded that only one out of every four jobs in the U.S. can be considered a "good job".)

How can a community (or a nation) reverse a trend like this, and turn its low-wage jobs back into good jobs? There's no single answer, but a new study performed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) makes a powerful case for the wage-raising effects of one strategy: unions.

CEPR looked at five years' worth of wages for union and nonunion workers in every state, adjusting for differences in education, age, experience, gender, and race to make sure they were comparing workers with similar characteristics. They broke it down further by examining the impact of unionization on workers at different wage levels.(Continued...)

Their findings:

• In every state and in the District of Columbia, unionization significantly improves workers' wages.


• Nationwide, low-wage workers gain the largest benefit from joining a union. The typical union wage premium for a low-wage worker (10th percentile wage level) is 20.7 percent: the equivalent of a raise from $10.00/hr.to $12.07/hr.


• In California:


• the lowest-wage workers (10th percentile) see a 16.5% wage increase from unionization;


• middle-wage workers (50th percentile) see a 15.9% wage increase;


• and higher-wage workers (90th percentile) see a 6.0% wage increase.

Unfortunately, joining a union isn't as easy as signing up on the dotted line. Workers who want to organize a union are usually subjected to intimidation, threats, harassment, mandatory anti-union meetings, or even being fired for speaking up (the latter is illegal, but it still happens, and even employers who get caught illegally firing employees for organizing don't face high enough penalties to be deterred.) The system currently in place, overseen by a National Labor Relations Board comprised of political appointees, is heavily slanted towards making it extremely difficult for workers to stand up for their rights while giving a free pass to unscrupulous employers, and indirectly penalizing those employers who try to treat their workers fairly and do the right thing.

Legislation currently in Congress, titled the Employee Free Choice Act, would help restore the rights that have been eroded by making it easier for a majority of employees in a workplace to form a union. Based on the findings of the CEPR study, this legislation would not only restore lost rights, but could also go a long way towards helping workers restore their eroded paychecks.

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Bay Area private sector workers achieve highest unionization rate since 1999

Bay Area union membership was on the rise in 2007, driven by increased unionization in the private sector.

An estimated 57,000 additional private-sector workers chose to join unions last year, bringing the private-sector unionization rate for the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland region up to 12.1%: the highest rate this decade.

Combining the public and private sectors, 18.2% of all workers in the Bay Area were covered by a union contract in 2007, up from 17.1% in 2006.

The United States as a whole saw an uptick from 12.0% to 12.1%: a small increase, but notable as the first recorded growth in the nation's unionization rate since the 1970s.

However, union membership in the Bay Area -- and the United States -- remains near historic lows following decades of decline. In the 1960s, about 30% of workers belonged to unions. Today, union coverage has been cut to the rock-bottom rate of 12%, despite the fact that survey after survey shows most U.S. workers want a union.(Continued...)

Although a majority of nonunion workers say they would vote for union representation, few ever get that opportunity, due to employer intimidation combined with ever-more-regressive federal labor laws that block workers from exercising their right to choose a union. This assault on workers intensified under the Bush administration, with the appointment of a strongly anti-labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Secretary of Labor.

The New York Times writes:

There is little doubt that American workers need unions. Wages today are almost 10 percent lower than they were in 1973, after accounting for inflation. The share of national income devoted to workers' wages and benefits is at its lowest since the late-1960s, while the share going to profits has surged. The decline in unionization has been a big part of the reason that workers have lost so much ground.

Source: Union membership data for the SJ-SF-Oakland region is from the Union Membership and Coverage Database, http://www.unionstats.com/, constructed by Barry T. Hirsch (Georgia State University) and David A. Macpherson (Florida State University). All unionization data used originates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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