Affordability’s key ingredient is union power: Tripling union membership would raise wages, reduce inequality, and strengthen communities. Policymakers should take note.
This is an excerpt from an op-ed originally published at In These Times. Read the full piece here.
Affordability—or the lack thereof—has dominated the recent political debate in the U.S. And for good reason. Across the country, too many families are struggling to make ends meet. However, almost every conversation about affordability focuses entirely on prices, as if the only way to make life more affordable is to make things cheaper.
But the actual driver of today’s affordability squeeze is suppressed pay—a consequence of decades of policy choices that weakened workers’ bargaining power and shifted income away from working people. Had pay for typical workers kept pace with productivity over the past 45 years, their paychecks today would be roughly 40% larger.
If policymakers are serious about addressing affordability, they would champion one institution that has consistently proven capable of raising pay: unions.
Through collective bargaining, unions are the most effective mechanism for workers to raise their wages and secure their fair share of the wealth they produce. Our new report at the Economic Policy Institute quantifies how transformative it would be to rebuild union power. Specifically, we examine what we stand to gain if we tripled current union membership to 30%—similar to its peak in the U.S. before decades of relentless attacks on unions and collective bargaining eroded it, and just shy of the current rate in Canada.
We find that tripling union membership would raise pay for the typical worker by more than $7,700 every year, or nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. This would be life-changing for a working family—nearly covering the cost of raising a child from birth through age 17, for example.
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