A Key Solution to America’s Shrinking Middle Class: Union Membership

by Tula Connell, Aug 4, 2007

America’s middle class is under siege—and the nation needs progressive solution to return our middle class to the dynamic economic force it has been throughout the 20th century. On a hot summer Saturday in Chicago, more than 60 progressive netroots activists at the YearlyKos Convention at McCormick Place joined in a discussion at one of many workshops here this morning, “The Middle Class: The Problems it Faces and Progressive Solutions.”

Organized by Bonddad, who writes at Huffington Post as well as on his own Bonddad Blog, the workshop panel included me, Progressive  Policy Institute co-founder Rob Shapiro, Auburn University professor and tech CEO Vic Uzumeri and DMI Communications Director Elana Levin. Rep. Brad Miller  (D-N.C.) had planned to be on the panel, but got stuck in D.C. in a final late voting flurry before Congress breaks until fall.

Access to higher education, often a key step on the road to the middle class, is becoming more and more out of reach. Levin pointed out how 410,000 students whose family income is less than $50,000 a year now go to community colleges, while many more can’t afford any college educatio at all. Yet while “college is no longer a guarantee to attain the middle class,” said Levin, it also shouldn’t be necessary to have a college degree to do achieve economic security. With 13 of 20 of the fastest growing occuptional groups in areas that do not require a college degree, we also should not “fall into the trap of thinking college can solve all our problems.”  

And that, of course, is where unions come in. In overviewing the decline of employer-based health care and pension benefits, my presentation  made clear that the decline in health care and retirement security parallel the decline in union membership. At the same time, although U.S. productivity has increased, since 1973, productivity and income no longer are growing together.  Workers’ productivity grew an impressive 18 percent between 2000 and 2006—but most people’s inflation-adjusted weekly wages only 1  percent during that time. This was the first economic expansion since World War II without a sustained pay increase for rank-and-file workers.

As fewer workers have access to affordable health care, retirement security, education and training, and as CEOs pay themselves more and more and their employees less and less, the middle class is sinking. From 1979 to 2004, the percentage of households in the “middle class” category—those with incomes between $30,000 and $90,000—fell from 47 percent to 39 percent.

An emphasis on enabling more workers to join unions must be part of the whole package of progressive solutions to the nation’s growing economic inequality. Here’s why. In 2006:

• Hourly workers not in unions earned $642 a week, compared with $833 for workers represented by union.
• Only 14  percent of nonunion workers had employer-provided pension coverage, compared with 68 percent of workers in unions.
• Some 80 percent of workers in unions had health care coverage, compared with 49 percent of nonunion workers.

More  than 60 million people say they would join a union if they could—but because the nation’s labor laws are so flawed and out of date, they can’t. We’ve written a lot here about the progress the union movement has made in seeking to change these outdated labor laws through our Employee Free Choice Act campaign, and we plan to carry on the fight through the 2008 elections when we elect a president who supports the freedom of workers to form unions.

Noting how the bond has broken between wages and productivity, and the rate of job growth and the growth rate of the economy, Schapiro pinpointed globalization as a key underlying factor in this fundamental shift in our economy. According to Schapiro, in 1990, 18 percent of all goods and services were traded across borders. By 2005, that figured had nearaly doubled to 30 percent. With nearly 50 percent of workers unable to access or utilize new technology, access to training and education is key, he said. He recommends ensuring all sixth graders have laptops to give them a jumpstart on needed skills, and provide funding to open computer labs on weekends so members of the community have access to equipment and training.

Uzumeri also emphasized the need for lifelong education. He described the nation’s economic ideology as divided between proressives, who emphasize stability—for instance, job and economic security—and conservatives, who say workers need to be ”agile” to meet the growing economic turbulence.

All participants emphasized the need for a comprehensive solution to our nation’s health care crisis—which we all agree is at the top of all our progressive agendas for moving this nation forward.

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