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Report: Union Membership Benefits Workers in Every State
Joining a union would be good for workers in every state in the nation because union members receive better pay and benefits than nonunion workers, according to a new report.
“The Unions of the States,” released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), studied union membership rates, size of the union workforce and wage and benefit advantages for union workers in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Click here to read the report.
The report found union membership rates vary widely, from more than 25 percent of workers in New York and Hawaii to fewer than 5 percent in North Carolina and South Carolina. California has the most union members, with 2.6 million, and Wyoming the least, with just about 20,000.
But no matter what the size of the union workforce, the union difference is clear in every state. The report says that in a typical state, union members are likely to earn 15 percent more an hour, have a 19 percent likelihood of having employer-provided health insurance and are 24 percent more likely to have an employer-sponsored retirement plan.
Based on the federal government’s monthly Current Population Survey, the report provides a snapshot of union members in each state by race, gender, public-sector or private-sector employment and more.
The report clearly makes the point that protecting workers’ right to join a union—the reason for the Employee Free Choice Act—is important and would benefit the country:
These findings demonstrate that, across the states, workers who are able to bargain collectively earn more and are more likely to have benefits associated with good jobs. Taken together these data strongly suggest that better protection of workers’ right to unionize would have a substantial positive impact on the pay and benefits workers in every state.
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8 Comments
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The full text link of this artice, several paragraphs below, is from the World Socialist Web Site:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/unio-f03.shtml
US trade union membership at lowest level in more than a century
By Jerry White
3 February 2010
Union membership in the United States fell another 10 percent in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the number of workers belonging to unions falling 771,000 to 15.3 million. Overall, the percentage of union members continued to fall to 12.3 percent, from 12.4 percent in 2008.
The decline was in large part due to the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and construction jobs last year due to the economic recession. This is, however, part of a decades-long trend, which has seen the percentage of private sector workers in unions fall to 7.2 percent last year, the lowest level since 1901.
…
For the first time in history, the number of unionized workers in the public sector surpassed the number of private sector workers in unions. According to government statistics, 7.9 million public sector employees belonged to a union compared to 7.4 million private sector employees. This is despite the fact that there are five times more wage and salary workers in the private sector.
…
All told, more than 8 million industrial jobs have been wiped out since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. The percentage of the labor force made up of manufacturing workers has continued its steady decline, falling to less than 9 percent, from a high of 39 percent in 1939.
Perhaps the sharpest expression of the moribund character of the unions is their inability to recruit younger workers. By age, the union membership rate was highest among workers 55 to 64 years old (16.6 percent), while only 4.7 percent of those 16 to 24 were union members.
Even a casual look at the CEPR study touted here suffices to identify several major problems.
One of the most significant is that the study ignores completely interstate differences in cost of living. Since the differences are substantial, and higher union density in a state is strongly correlated with higher living costs, this is a major problem for comparing wages in high-union-density and low-union-density states. A reasonable comparison would have to adjust for interstate differences in cost of living — and the CEPR study does not even try to make such an adjustment.
Data furnished by the nonpartisan Missouri Economic Research and Information Center show that, in 2008, the aggregate cost of living for residents of the 10 states with the highest private-sector union density was 21.8% above the national average. That is, basic living costs for residents of these states were on average nearly 22% than for the average American. Meanwhile, the aggregate cost of living for residents of the 10 states with the lowest private-sector union density was 4.8% below the national average.
If the CEPR study had taken interstate cost of living differences into account, it would surely have had to acknowledge what other studies have found: Employees’ real, spendable earnings are on average higher in low union density states than they are in high union density states.
Stan Greer
National Right to Work Committee
National Institute for Labor Relations Research
Mr. Greer,
As the author of the study cited in this blog post, I want to respond to your comment.
The CEPR report does control completely for differences in the cost of living across the states.
If you read the report (rather than simply run boilerplate criticisms from the NRWC), you will see that we compare union to non-union workers *within* each state. So, for a relatively low cost of living state such as Alabama, we compare earnings for a union worker in Alabama to earnings for a non-union worker in Alabama. For a relatively high cost of living state such as New York, we compare a union worker in New York to a non-union worker in New York.
We also control for age (union workers are on average older than non-union workers), education (union workers are on average a little better educated than non-union workers), and industry of employment (union workers on average work in higher wage industries).
Even after controling for all of these effects, we find that union workers earn about 15 percent more than comparable non-union workers, and are much more likely than non-union workers to have health insurance and pensions.
John Schmitt
CEPR
Thank you John Schmitt.
A healthy CEPR fact against NRWC “fact” debate or discussion is example on how unions are going to need to inform the public. We can’t just just except a dwindling membership, (only recently growing back a little) a massively misinformed public, and a “just hope to make retirement” attitude and expect good results.
Like it or not people, the reason unions are somewhat okay right now, or were doing real well during the 70′s was the ardious struggles of previous generations that didn’t except “better than nothing” contracts and never stoped organising, educating and talking to friends, family members, children and public. And that was the easy part. They also were beaten, tar and feathered, some even died. And this is because they knew what would happen if they didn’t fight.
You can’t just have a contract, rush back home or to a bar after work every day and just assume everythings fine. While your doing that, pussbags like the NRWC doing everything possible to **** up the world. Being a member of a union is a right and a privilige. You have to work constantly to counter-measure every action of the reptiles on Wall Street or K Street. The first and easiest way to do that STAY INFORMED.
And when someone like Stan Greer writes something, yeah, read it too, even though its patent BS, because we need to know the what gullible people might be absorbing. And how to steer them to the facts. But remember also the divertors-that will do anything possible to divide you with propaganda and distract you with moronic arguements that illegals are destroying us all…yeah its them not the @#$%^&* that are hiring them then threatening them to take crap wages. And lobbying at the same time to keep their illegal status.
Stan:
Your response dodges the key finding of CEPR’s report: Union members enjoy a substantial wage advantage compared with non-union workers in every state, regardless of region, union density or cost-of-living. The union advantage is even greater re: health insurance and pension coverage.
Cost-of-living varies from state to state but the data you present on this are not authoritative.
John Schmitt, I’ve looked at your study, and it most certainly does not control for interstate differences in cost of living. You argue you don’t need to do this, because the study compares the earnings of unionized and nonunion workers within states.
However, Tula Connell and others are using your study to push for enactment of the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act.” The purpose of this legislation is to increase the share of private-sector workers who are unionized in all 50 states. Connell et al claim that your study shows that such an increase would raise the earnings of all employees.
My point was that, when you take interstate differences in cost of living into account, the earnings of all employees (union and nonunion) are lower in the most heavily unionized states than are the earnings of all employees in the least unionized states.
This is obviously relevant to whether or not the so-called “EFCA” would be good for employees on the whole. Do you reject my point? It certainly is not disproven by anything in your study.
Furthermore, even if you just look at unionized vs. nonunion workers within a state, your study still has glaring weaknesses.
First, there are substantial variations of living costs within states, and they are not randomly correlated with unionization. In New York State, for example, the New York City metro area is far more expensive to live in than the rest of the state, and much more heavily unionized. So it is not true that you have factored out cost of living in comparing the earnings of union and nonunion workers in New York State. And the same is true of many other states.
Furthermore, multiple studies show that unionized firms are far less likely to expand the number of their employees and significantly more likely to reduce the number of their employees than are union-free firms. It directly follows from those findings that union-free workers have significantly more opportunities to get promoted within firm than do comparable unionized workers. Union-free workers are also significantly less likely to get laid off than are comparable unionized workers.
In deciding whether unionization makes workers better off, you need to consider all factors, not just convenient ones.
I am only scratching the surface here of the flaws both in the CEPR study itself and in the implications that are being drawn from it by union spokesmen. But there are only so many hours in the day.
Stan Greer
National Right to Work Committee
National Institute for Labor Relations Research
Mr. Greer,
You remind of the guy who tells his neighbor: “I didn’t borrow your lawnmower. I put it back yesterday. It was broken when I took it.” Any anti-union argument is fine. It doesn’t matter whether it is consistent with other anti-union arguments you’ve already made, even in the same comment.
I think it is pretty uncontroversial that unions raise wages and benefits. That is a key reason why the employers so frequently oppose unionization. All that the CEPR study released yesterday did was to use data to quantify the size of that impact.
I’d encourage anyone who has any doubts about the CEPR study to read it and compare it with the “Missouri Economic Research and Information Center” analysis.
John Schmitt
CEPR
Stanley,
Talk to the workers and see what they say. Most people with degrees and six figure salaries from Wall Street to Washington just don’t seem to get it because they’ve never really had to struggle to make a living, even though they claim they have.
Right to work is a race to the bottom. No, more like a big flush. We’re tired of listening to “sucker bait.” The “fat cats” are quite fat enough in our view.