Report: We Need Unions to Build an Economy with Good Jobs

by Seth Michaels, Sep 2, 2009

A strong, sustainable economy doesn’t just depend on job creation—it depends on the creation of good jobs in which employees are paid fairly and receive health care and retirement benefits.

As workers across the country know, we’ve been heading in the wrong direction, and to turn the economy around, we need to give workers a shot at bargaining for a better life. 

In a new report, “Creating Decent Jobs in the United States,” Jeannette Wicks-Lim of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts takes a close look at trends in employment, wages and benefits. She concludes that we need to make real policy changes to help improve jobs in this country—including restoring the freedom to form unions by passing the Employee Free Choice Act. 

The race to the bottom in job quality has real consequences for workers and their families. Wicks-Lim notes that, if current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of the workforce in 2016 won’t have a job that pays 200 percent of poverty-level wages or provides health and retirement benefits. 

To turn this dangerous trend around, we need real changes in policy—including making sure workers have the power to have an impact on their own wages, benefits and working conditions through the bargaining process. As Wicks-Lim notes: 

Unions represent one important structural change that would improve the ability of the U.S. economy to create decent jobs. Labor unions equip workers with the bargaining power they need to negotiate significant improvements to their working conditions. At the same time, no strong evidence exists that the better pay that unions can achieve for workers will raise business costs excessively and thereby reduce the availability of jobs. 

A significant rise in the proportion of workers who bargain collectively over their working conditions could meaningfully raise the number of decent jobs offered in the U.S. 

Wicks-Lim looks at the striking disparity between productivity growth and wages in America over the past three decades and says that when more workers collectively bargain, they’re more likely to get a fair share of the value their work creates. She also demolishes the all-too-common claim that unions hurt employment. 

The Employee Free Choice Act, Wicks-Lim says, is the kind of positive policy change we need to make sure workers have the power to improve their jobs. These effects will lift up the whole economy, she concludes. 

You can read the full report here.

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