research on unions

Center for Union Facts

The Center for Union Facts (CUF) has compiled the single most comprehensive database of information about labor unions in the United States. The database contains more than 100 million facts , ranging from basic union finances and leader salaries, to political operations, to strikes and unfair labor practices, and much more. The data comes from various local, state, and federal government agencies that track labor union operations.

Other CUF Projects

U.S. Department of the Treasury

Labor unions and the u.s. economy.

By Laura Feiveson, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomics

Today, the Treasury Department released a first-of-its-kind report on labor unions, highlighting the evidence that unions serve to strengthen the middle class and grow the economy at large. Over the last half century, middle-class households have experienced stagnating wages, rising income volatility, and reduced intergenerational mobility, even as the economy as a whole has prospered. Unions can improve the well-being of middle-class workers in ways that directly combat these negative trends. Pro-union policy can make a real difference to middle-class households by raising their incomes, improving their work environments, and boosting their job satisfaction. In doing so, unions can help to make the economy more equitable and robust.

Over the last century, union membership rates and income inequality have diverged, as shown in Figure 1. Union membership peaked in the 1950s at one-third of the workforce.  At that time, despite pervasive racial and gender discrimination, overall income inequality was close to its lowest level since its peak before the Great Depression, and was continuing to fall.  Over the subsequent decades, union membership steadily declined, while income inequality began to steadily rise after a trough in the 1970s. In 2022, union membership plateaued at 10 percent of workers while the top one percent of income earners earned almost 20 percent of total income.

Figure 1: Union Membership and Inequality

While the overall U.S. economy has grown over the past few decades, the rise in inequality can be a proxy for the experience of many middle-class households. The income of the median family rose only 0.6 percent per year, in contrast to average personal income per household which rose 1.1 percent per year, as seen in Figure 2.  And, notably, other markers of middle-class stability have deteriorated since the 1970s. Income has become more volatile, [1] the amount of time spent on vacation has fallen, [2] and middle-class Americans are less prepared for retirement. [3] Intergenerational mobility has declined—90 percent of children born in the 1940s earned more than their parents did at age 30, while only half of children born in the mid-1980s did the same. [4]  

Figure 2: Income and Wage Growth since the 1960s

So, how could unions help? Treasury’s report shows that unions have the potential to address some of these negative trends by raising middle-class wages, improving work environments, and promoting demographic equality. Of course, unions should not be the only solution to these structural trends. But the evidence below and in the report suggests that unions can be useful in building the economy from the middle out.

Wages 

One of the most oft-cited benefits of unions is the so-called “union wage premium”—the amount that union members make above and beyond non-members.  While simple comparisons of the wages of union workers and nonunion workers find that union workers typically make about 20 percent more than nonunion workers, [5] economists turn to other types of analysis to capture causal effects of unions on wages. The first approach controls for many worker and occupation characteristics with the goal of comparing the wages earned by two similar workers that differ only in their union status. The other empirical approach is “regression discontinuity analysis,” which compares the wages in workplaces which just barely passed a vote to unionize against wages in workplaces that barely failed to pass the unionization vote. All in all, the evidence from these two approaches points to a union wage premium of around 10 to 15 percent, with larger effects for longer-tenured workers. [6]

Work environments

Worker wellbeing is greatly affected by non-wage benefits. Some benefits, such as healthcare benefits and retirement benefits, are a part of the compensation package and have substantial monetary value. Other features of the work environment, like flexible scheduling or workplace safety regulations, may not have direct monetary value but could still be highly valued by workers. For example, one study estimated that the average worker is willing to give up 20 percent of wages to avoid having their schedule frequently changed by their employer on short notice. [7] Another study, co-authored by Secretary Yellen, found that 80 percent of people who like their jobs cite a non-wage reason as the primary cause of their satisfaction and, conversely, 80 percent of people who dislike  their jobs cite non-wage reasons to explain their dissatisfaction. [8]

There is strong evidence that unions improve both fringe benefits and non-wage features of the workplace. Figure 3 shows how much more likely it is for a union worker to be offered certain amenities than a nonunion worker. While these simple comparisons reflect correlations only, studies that use more robust empirical approaches find the same: unions have had a large hand in improving work environments on many dimensions and, in doing so, raise the wellbeing of workers and their families. [9]

Figure 3: Fringe Benefits and Amenities

Workplace Equality

The diverse demographics of modern union membership mean that the benefits of any policy that strengthens today’s unions would be felt across the population.Union membership is now roughly equal across men and women. In 2021, Black men had a particularly high union representation rate at 13 percent, as compared to the population average of 10 percent. [10]  

Unions promote within-firm equality by adopting explicit anti-discrimination measures, supporting anti-discrimination legislation and enforcement, and promoting wage-setting practices that are less susceptible to implicit bias. As an example of egalitarian wage-setting practices, single rate or automatic progression wage structures contribute to lower within-firm income inequality compared to firms that make individual determinations. [11] These types of practices, and others like publicly available pay schedules, benefit women and vulnerable workers who can be less likely to negotiate aggressively for pay raises. 

Empirical studies have confirmed that unions have, indeed, closed race and gender gaps within firms. For example, one study finds that the wage gap between Black and white women was significantly reduced due to union measures. [12] Another study provides evidence of how collective bargaining has reduced gender wage gaps amongst teachers. [13]

The positive effects of unions are not limited to union workers. Nonunionized firms in competition with unionized workplaces may choose to raise wages, change hiring practices, or improve their workplace environment to attract workers. [14] Unions can also affect workplace norms by, say, lobbying for workplace safety improvements, or advocating for changes in minimum wage laws. [15] The empirical evidence finds that these positive spillovers exist. Each 1 percentage point increase in private-sector union membership rates translates to about a 0.3 percent increase in nonunion wages. These estimates are larger for workers without a college degree, the majority of America’s workforce. [16]  

Unions may also produce benefits for communities that extend beyond individual workers and employers by enhancing social capital and civic engagement. Union members vote 12 percentage points more often than nonunion members, and nonunion members in union households vote 3 percentage points more often than individuals in nonunion households. [17] In addition, union members are more likely to donate to charity, attend community meetings, participate in a neighborhood project, and volunteer for an organization. [18]

Increased unionization has the potential to contribute to the reversal of the stark increase in inequality seen over the last half century. In turn, increased financial stability to those in the middle or bottom of the income distribution could alleviate borrowing constraints, allowing workers to start businesses, build human capital, and exploit investment opportunities. [19]  Reducing inequality can also promote economic resilience by reducing the financial fragility of the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution, making these Americans less sensitive to negative income shocks and thus lessening economic volatility. [20] In short, unions can promote economy-wide growth and resilience.

All in all, the evidence presented in Treasury’s report challenges the view that worker empowerment holds back economic prosperity. In addition to their effect on the economy through more equality, unions can have a positive effect on productivity through employee engagement and union voice effects, providing a road map for the type of union campaigns that could lead to additional growth. [21] One such example found that patient outcomes improved in hospitals where registered nurses unionized. [22]

The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes the benefits of unions to the middle class and the broader economy and has taken actions, outlined in Treasury’s report, to empower workers. There have been promising signs: union petitions in 2022 rose to their highest level since 2015, [23] and public opinion in support of unions is at its highest level in over 50 years. [24] The evidence summarized here and in Treasury’s report suggest these burgeoning signs of strengthening worker power are good news for the middle class and the economy as a whole. 

[1] Dynan, Karen, Douglas Elmendorf, and Daniel Sichel. 2012. “The Evolution of Household Income Volatility.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 12 (2).

[2] Van Dam, Andrew. 2023. “The mystery of the disappearing vacation day.” The Washington Post, February 10, 2023.

[3] Johnson, Richard W., and Karen E. Smith. 2022. “How Might Millennials Fare in Retirement?” Urban Institute , September 2022.

[4] Chetty, et al. (2017).

[5] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2023. Table 2.: Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by union affiliation and selected characteristics. Last modified January 19, 2023.

[6] For example: Gittleman, Maury, and Morris M. Kleiner. 2016. "Wage effects of unionization and occupational licensing coverage in the United States."  ILR Review  69 (1): 142–172; Kleiner, Morris M., and Alan B. Krueger. 2013. “Analyzing the Extent and Influence of Occupational Licensing on the Labor Market.” Journal of Labor Economics 31 (2): S173–S202; DiNardo, John, and David S. Lee. 2004. “Economic Impacts of New Unionization on Private Sector Employers: 1984–2001.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119 (4): 1383–1441; Frandsen, Brigham R. 2021. “The Surprising Impacts of Unionization: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data.” Journal of Labor Economics 39 (4): 861–894.

[7] Mas, Alexandre, and Amanda Pallais. 2017. "Valuing alternative work arrangements."  American Economic Review  107 (12): 3722–59.

[8] Akerlof, George A., Andrew K. Rose, and Janet L. Yellen. 1988. "Job switching and job satisfaction in the US labor market."  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity  1988 (2): 495–594.

[9] Knepper, Matthew. 2020. “From the Fringe to the Fore: Labor Unions and Employee Compensation.” The Review of Economics and Statistics  102 (1): 98–112.

[10] Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and author’s calculations using BLS data, accessed through IPUMS. Data reflect 2022 values. Sample is employed 16+ year olds. Excludes workers represented by, but not a member of, unions.

[11] See, e.g., Card (1996) and Freeman (1982). Freeman, Richard B. 1982. "Union wage practices and wage dispersion within establishments." ILR Review 36 (1): 3–21.

[12] Rosenfeld, Jake, and Meredith Kleykamp. 2012. “Organized Labor and Racial Wage Inequality in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (5): 1460–1502.

[13] Biasi, Barbara, and Heather Sarsons. 2022. "Flexible wages, bargaining, and the gender gap."  The Quarterly Journal of Economics  137 (1): 215–266.

[14] Fortin, Nicole M., Thomas Lemieux, and Neil Lloyd. 2021. "Labor market institutions and the distribution of wages: The role of spillover effects."  Journal of Labor Economics  39 (S2): S369–S412; Taschereau-Dumouchel, Mathieu. 2020. "The Union Threat."  The Review of Economic Studies  87 (6): 2859–2892.

[15] The impact of changes in government policy arising out of union advocacy is not the focus of this paper; however, Ahlquist (2017) suggests that advocacy plays an important role in unions’ impacts on the labor market. Spillovers and “threat effects” within the labor market, however, are discussed in this paper. Ahlquist, John S. 2017. “Labor Unions, Political Representation, and Economic Inequality.” Annual Review of Political Science 20 (1): 409–432. 

[16] Note: Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird (2016) do not interpret their estimates causally. Their approach suffers from many of the CPS’s sample size limitations. Although the CPS ostensibly reports quite detailed occupational codes, Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird estimate regressions with only four occupational codes and 18 industry codes. This data limitation greatly increases the risks that the regression-adjusted approach cannot control for selection effects into unionization. 

[17] This 12-percentage-point union voting premium largely reflects socioeconomic factors associated with individuals who join a union. However, when comparing members with non-members who exhibit similar characteristics, there remains a union voting premium of 4 percentage points. Freeman, Richard B. 2003. “What Do Unions Do…to Voting?” National Bureau of Economic Research , working paper no. 9992.

[18] Zullo, Roland. 2011. “Labor Unions and Charity.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 64 (4): 699–711. 

[19]  Aghion, P., E. Caroli, and C. Garcia-Penalosa. 1999. “Inequality and Economic Growth: The Perspective of the New Growth Theories.” Journal of Economic Literature 37 (4): 1615–60.

[20]  Kumhof, Michael, Romain Rancière, and Pablo Winant. 2015. “Inequality, Leverage, and Crises.” American Economic Review 105 (3): 1217–45.

[21] Doucouliagos, Christos, Richard B. Freeman, and Patrice Laroche. 2017. The Economics of Trade Unions: A study of a Research Field and Its Findings . London: Routledge.

[22] Dube, Arindrajit, Ethan Kaplan, and Owen Thompson. 2016. “Nurse unions and patient outcomes.”  ILR Review  69 (4): 803–833.

[23] National Labor Relations Board. 2022. “Election Petitions Up 53%, Board Continues to Reduce Case Processing Time in FY22.” Press release. October 6, 2022.  https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/election-petitions-up-53-board-continues-to-reduce-case-processing-time-in .

[24] McCarthy, Justin. 2022. “U.S. Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965.” Gallup , August 30, 202 2.

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Expert Commentary

Research sheds light on how labor unions reduced income inequality from WWII through the 1970s

Unions played a key role in reducing income inequality during the middle of the 20th century, when the wage difference between the highest and lowest earners significantly shrank.

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by Clark Merrefield, The Journalist's Resource October 4, 2021

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Recent research in the Quarterly Journal of Economics offers previously unseen levels of detail unraveling the relationship between labor unions and income inequality in the U.S.

The study, “ Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data ,” suggests rising union membership from the 1930s to the 1960s strongly contributed to closing the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans during those decades, with particular gains for racial and ethnic minorities. The results are largely based on responses to more than 500 Gallup surveys from 1936 to 1986.

Further, a “premium” of 10% to 20% higher income for union households compared with non-union households from the 1940s through the mid-2010s remains “relatively consistent over our long sample period, despite the large swings in density and composition of union members that we document,” the authors write.

Union density generally refers to the share of workers in an industry who are in a union. The Gallup surveys did not consistently ask about health insurance coverage and paid vacation time, so the authors do not explore benefits other than higher wages that can come with union jobs.

New measures of union density

Before 1973, economists estimated union membership at the national level. For example, Rutgers University labor economist Leo Troy used union dues revenue and other data to estimate national union membership from 1897 to 1962 for a book the National Bureau of Economic Research published in 1965.

Eight years later, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics began asking about union membership as part of their Current Population Survey , a monthly survey of 60,000 households. Labor economists could, for the first time, analyze individual union membership.

But by then, union density was trending downward.

The new analysis of Gallup data shows the share of U.S. households with a union member had fallen under 30% by that time, down from a high of nearly 35% in the mid-1950s.  

“Almost everything economists knew had come from this post-1970 period when unions were in decline,” says Suresh Naidu , an economics professor at Columbia University and co-author of the recent paper with Henry Farber , Daniel Herbst and Ilyana Kuziemko . “So we were like, ‘Let’s see what this looks like when you look at the period when unions were increasing.’”

The Gallup data come from a trove of surveys, available through the Roper Center for Public Opinion at Cornell University, that starting in 1937 asked respondents whether anyone in their household was a union member. The authors go back an additional year using a survey about household spending on union dues in 1936 conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the now-defunct Bureau of Home Economics .

Using those surveys and the Current Population Survey since 1973, along with other data sources, the authors find the share of union households skyrocketed from just over 10% in 1936 to roughly one-third in 1955. Union density held steady around 30% through the 1960s before dropping below 25% by 1985.

The rise of unions from 1936 to 1968 explains about 25% of the decline during that period in the Gini coefficient , a common measure of income inequality, according to the paper. The lower the Gini coefficient for a nation, the narrower the gap between its highest and lowest income earners.

After 1968, falling union membership explains roughly 10% of increasing income inequality over the next five decades, the authors find.

In 2020, about 11% of wage and salary earners were union members — 35% of them in the public sector and 6% in the private sector, according to the Current Population Survey. Union workers earned a median of $1,144 per week in 2020, compared with $958 for non-union workers. Put another way, union workers earn $1 for every 84 cents a non-union worker earns.

Although dozens of local union shops remained racially segregated in the South during the years after World War II, unions generally also “drew in disadvantaged groups such as the less educated and nonwhite households,” find Naidu and co-authors Henry Farber , Daniel Herbst and Ilyana Kuziemko .

“That suggests a reason why unions mid-century were a powerful force for equality,” Naidu says. “They brought in the people worst off in the labor market and raised their wages a lot.”

Black workers in particular continue to be represented by unions at a relatively high rate. In 2020, nearly 14% of Black workers could claim union representation, compared with 12% of white workers, 11% of Hispanic or Latino workers and 10% of Asian workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.

The U.S. economy from the Great Depression through the postwar years looked very different than it does today. Before, during and after the war, unions organized some of the biggest firms engaged in domestic production for domestic buyers — think Ford, General Motors and U.S. Steel.

The 1940s specifically were “a decade of extraordinary wage compression,” as economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo explain in a February 1992 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The difference between the highest and lowest wage earners narrowed so significantly that Goldin and Margo dubbed those years the “Great Compression.”

As Farber, Herbst, Kuziemko and Naidu find, the Great Compression was partly spurred by unionization.

Likewise, an August 2018 paper in The Economic History Review finds that parts of the U.S. where unions grew briskly during the 1940s also show greater reductions in wage inequality than places where unions expanded less quickly.

“In 1950 we lived in an economy where Americans bought American-made goods,” explains Farber, an economics professor at Princeton University. “It’s pre-globalization. There was this overarching agreement between unions and management that management would accept the unions, unions would allow management to manage, and there would be labor peace without the opportunity to strike during a contract. Roughly speaking, it was sharing the gains that came from having a protected product market, because Americans didn’t want to buy cars made elsewhere.”

National markets are also more interconnected than they were midcentury. The U.S. is now a net importer of goods. The U.S. imported $2.3 trillion worth of goods in 2020, $911 billion more than it exported. Census data on trade balances go back to 1960 , when the nation imported $15 billion worth of goods — nearly $5 billion less than it exported.

Finally, U.S. jobs are no longer dominated by manufacturing. In 1950, manufacturing firms produced $225 billion worth of goods, roughly 40% of the nation’s entire industrial output, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By late 2019, before COVID-19, manufacturing represented 16% of the nation’s industrial output.

Today, the biggest firms in the U.S. — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook — are data companies. If they do build physical products, like cell phones, that largely happens overseas. Income inequality has grown , with the highest income earners in the U.S. having gradually taken home a larger share of the national income from 1980 onward.

Here’s how the manufacturing decline has played out in the labor market: Nearly 30% of full- and part-time U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing in 1950. By 2019, 8% worked in manufacturing while 18% worked in retail, hospitality or food services.

Citing federal labor statistics, Vanderbilt University sociologist Daniel Cornfield writes in a 1986 paper in the American Journal of Sociology that in “manufacturing — the traditional source of union membership — the percentage of unionized workers declined from 51.3% to 39.9% between 1956 and 1978.”

The decline in manufacturing as a share of unionized workers has continued over the last 20 years. In 2000, 15% of union jobs were in manufacturing. By 2020, that figure had dipped to 8.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Unionization rates for government jobs have held relatively steady over the last two decades, with about 37% of the public sector unionized today. Private sector unionization has fallen from 2000 to 2020, from 9% to 6%. The educational services sector is a notable exception, growing from 12% unionization in 2000 to 14% in 2020.

Utilities, transportation, warehousing and telecommunications remain the most unionized industries, though union density in each has declined by over 5% since 2000 — and by almost 10% in telecommunications alone.

How unions grew

The “ Unions and Inequality ” authors identify two primary ways unions expanded before and during World War II and the Great Compression.

The first was the Wagner Act , which President Franklin Roosevelt signed in 1935 and which the Supreme Court upheld in 1937 . The act, sponsored by New York Sen. Robert Wagner , established the National Labor Relations Board . It brought legal protection to private sector unionization and collective bargaining activities, with some unions turning their focus toward organizing unskilled workers after it became law.

Before the Wagner Act, most workers involved in industrial manufacturing were not in unions. Large companies sometimes used physical violence to break organizing campaigns. “Henry Ford, whose brutal private army was well known by his workers, set the tone for how to crush unions,” recounts University of Rhode Island labor historian Erik Loomis in his 2018 book, “A History of America in Ten Strikes.”

Governments at all levels also had historically sided with employers, “with military deployments and judicial repression commonplace,” the authors of the recent paper write in the appendix .

The second event that led to union expansion was Roosevelt establishing the National War Labor Board in January 1942, weeks after the U.S. entered World War II. The board seated 12 representatives drawn from private firms, unions and the public sector. It was tasked with settling labor disputes before they affected wartime production.

“The government was letting very large defense contracts for armaments and so on and requiring, as a condition of the contract, by executive order, that companies be open to unionization,” Farber says. “In places that had a lot of government contracts, there was a growth in unionization and inequality in those places at those times declined.”

The Wagner Act also protected recognition strikes, says Naidu. Over the five years after the act passed, strikes were successful in gaining union recognition 40% of the time, compared with about 20% during the seven years before the act, the authors find.

The Korean War provides an important check on their findings. A smaller conflict than World War II, the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 still required massive production of tanks, planes, ammunition and guns.

Difference was, firms that got government contracts during the Korean War didn’t have to allow unionization efforts. The authors find “no correlation between Korean War Defense spending and changes in state union density or inequality measures.”

About The Author

Clark Merrefield

Unions & Worker Organizations

The Labor Center conducts research on unions and worker organizations and how they affect the lives of working people. This research has included the effects of unions on workers’ wages and benefits, how that differs by race, ethnicity and gender, and the role of unions in shaping public policy. The Center analyzes state and local policies that support worker voice on the job and the ability of workers to organize. We also study the effectiveness of organizing and bargaining strategies and methods.

See also our Labor-Managements Partnerships program

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Most americans see unions as a gateway to financial stability and job security.

Poll: Labor Unions in America

This Navigator Research report contains polling data on Americans’ latest perceptions of labor unions, including what Americans view as the most important benefits of labor unions, perceptions of anti-union policies and declines in union membership, and which party Americans view as the most equipped to strengthen labor unions and empower workers. 

Two in three Americans support making it easier for employees to form or join a labor union, with even larger shares who support the “right to bargain collectively” and to increase worker power in the United States.

By a 51-point margin, most Americans support labor laws that would make it easier for employees to form or join a labor union (66 percent support – 15 percent oppose), including four in five Democrats (81 percent), two in three Republicans (67 percent), and even half of Republicans (49 percent). An even larger share of Americans — 79 percent — say they support employees’ right to collectively bargain, and 77 percent also say they support increasing worker power in the United States. When asked to rank the top four most appealing aspects of labor unions, “better pay ” was listed across party lines and among both union households and non-union households as the biggest draw for union membership. 

• Other aspects seen as most appealing about being in a union include “better benefits like PTO, parental or sick leave, and health care” (46 percent), “job security” (40 percent), and “better pension or retirement plans (37 percent). While “making it harder for managers and executives to take advantage of working people” was ranked lower overall (28 percent), it is in the top four most appealing aspects for those living in union households (36 percent).

A plurality of Americans blame corporations more for declining union membership than believe the benefit of joining a union is not as appealing as it once was.

Less than one in three view a decline in union membership as a product of unions not being as appealing as they once were (32 percent), while a greater share view corporations making it harder for workers to unionize as being to blame (44 percent). Significantly larger shares of Democrats (57 percent blame corporations – 22 percent not as appealing) and independents (43 percent blame corporations – 22 percent not as appealing) are much more likely to blame corporations than a weakened appeal in union membership. 

• While different views exist as to why membership is in decline, Americans say they view this decline as bad for workers and the economy: by a 22-point margin, Americans view the decline of union membership as having a negative impact on the country (21 percent positive impact – 43 percent negative impact). Democrats and those living in union households are most likely to say the decline in union membership is having a negative impact on the country (55 percent and 54 percent, respectively). 

When asked about the potential effects of increasing union membership, seven in ten say there would be both a positive impact on wages paid to working people (71 percent) and the availability of jobs with benefits like PTO, parental or sick leave, and health care (70 percent), while about two in three say there would be a positive impact on workplace safety (69 percent), the well-being of workers who are newly represented by unions (67 percent), and training and apprenticeship programs (65 percent).

Biden and Democrats are more trusted on union and worker empowerment than Republicans.

By a 19-point margin, Democrats are more trusted than Republicans to strengthen labor unions (43 percent Biden/Democrats – 24 percent Republicans). These margins are consistent across a range of issues related to unions and worker quality of life, including “helping workers join labor unions to secure better pay and benefits” (net +18; 44 percent Biden and Democrats – 26 percent Republicans), “creating good-paying union jobs” (net +14; 44 percent Biden/Democrats – 30 percent Republicans), and “looking out for people who work for a living” (net +8; 46 percent Biden and Democrats – 38 percent Republicans)

• Democrats are generally viewed as being more pro-union, while Republicans are generally viewed more as being anti-union: 42 percent of Americans say they believe Republicans are anti-union compared to just 14 percent who believe they are pro-union, while 49 percent think Democrats are pro-union and just 10 percent believe they are anti-union.

Centering financial peace of mind and the ability to negotiate higher pay to keep up with rising costs are seen as the most convincing pro-union arguments.

  Among a variety of arguments that were all viewed as convincing reasons to support labor unions, the top two performers included: 

• Hardworking Americans deserve the security and peace of mind knowing they can afford to raise a family and retire comfortably, which is why it’s important to support growth in union jobs , which give working people the collective strength to negotiate for better pay as well as retirement plans and high-quality health insurance (83 percent found this convincing; 89 percent of those living in union households and 76 percent of independents found this argument to be convincing); and, 
• One way that the country has become increasingly unaffordable is big corporations have used their power to price gouge, increasing profits and benefiting those at the top while everyone else is worse off. Labor unions can give working people more power to negotiate for better pay and keep up with rising costs (76 percent found this convincing; 83 percent of those living in union households and 75 percent of independents found this argument to be convincing).

While anti-union laws are strongly unfavorable across party lines, most don’t understand that “right to work” laws are anti-union laws.

Just over one in ten say they have favorable views of “anti-union laws” (net -37; 13 percent favorable – 50 percent unfavorable), with net favorability underwater across the board amongst Democrats (net -47), independents (net -35), and Republicans (net -16). Despite anti-union laws being deeply unpopular, “right to work laws” are viewed favorably across party lines (net +33; 50 percent favorable – 17 percent unfavorable). Even among those who are favorable to labor unions, “right to work laws” were viewed favorably (net +34).

Anti-union efforts from Republican politicians are deeply concerning to Americans.

Respondents were shown the following statement about anti-union efforts from Republican politicians: “Most Republicans oppose labor unions and have passed laws making it harder for labor unions to protect working people and increase wages. Policies pushed or already passed by Republicans across the country include banning collective bargaining, eliminating health and safety protections, and letting companies that cheated workers out of their wages off the hook. Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage and want to go further, removing rules in place to ensure workers are paid fairly. If they get their way, even more power will shift from working people back to billionaires and big corporations, allowing them to further rig the system at the expense of working families.” Seven in ten found this statement to be concerning (71 percent), including nine in ten Democrats (90 percent), seven in ten independents (70 percent), and nearly half of Republicans (49 percent). 

• In a separate question, the top concerns Americans have regarding anti-union policies being pursued by Republican politicians include “Republicans want to take power from working people and give it back to billionaires and big corporations, allowing them to further rig the system at the expense of working families” (41 percent) and that “Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage and want to go further, removing rules that are in place to ensure workers get paid fair wages they can make a living on” (32 percent).

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About the study.

Global Strategy Group conducted public opinion surveys among a sample of 1,000 registered voters from August 17-August 21, 2023. 105 additional interviews were conducted among Hispanic voters. 75 additional interviews were conducted among Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. 103 additional interviews were conducted among African American voters. 100 additional interviews were conducted among independent voters. 100 additional interviews were conducted among union households. The survey was conducted online, Nationwide surveys of registered voters; Each wave represents approximately 1,000 interviews taken over the prior three-five days. recruiting respondents from an opt-in online panel vendor. Respondents were verified against a voter file and special care was taken to ensure the demographic composition of our sample matched that of the national registered voter population across a variety of demographic variables.

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In a world where the news cycle is the length of a tweet, our leaders often lack the real-time public-sentiment analysis to shape the best approaches to talking about the issues that matter the most. Navigator is designed to act as a consistent, flexible, responsive tool to inform policy debates by conducting research and reliable guidance to inform allies, elected leaders, and the press. Navigator is a project led by pollsters from Global Strategy Group and GBAO along with an advisory committee, including: Andrea Purse, progressive strategist; Arkadi Gerney, The Hub Project; Joel Payne, The Hub Project; Christina Reynolds, EMILY’s List; Delvone Michael, Working Families; Felicia Wong, Roosevelt Institute; Mike Podhorzer, AFL-CIO; Jesse Ferguson, progressive strategist; Navin Nayak, Center for American Progress Action Fund; Stephanie Valencia, EquisLabs; and Melanie Newman, Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

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RESEARCH December 13, 2022

The latest research on unions demonstrates that they reduce the spread of COVID-19 for workers and the broader public

• The experience of of workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic shows that U.S. workers need labor unions because neither government regulations nor market forces are sufficient to protect workers.
• The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has improved workplace safety since its founding in 1971, yet thousands of workers are killed and millions are maimed at work each year in the United States.
• Relying on market forces alone to help address worker safety problems is unlikely to meaningfully improve workplace safety because many U.S. workers find it difficult to quit even when facing poor working conditions.
• U.S. workers also may be deterred from moving themselves and their families to new job opportunities because of important family and community ties in their present location, which in turn can lead to local labor markets that are riddled with market failures, such as unsafe working conditions.
• This report demonstrates that labor unions in one key sector of the care economy—nursing homes—can mitigate these market failures by providing workers with a voice in the workplace and enabling them to bargain collectively with their employers.
• This report details why safe worksites are often won through union-led struggles, not automatically generated by market competition, focusing on nursing homes and the broader U.S. economy.
• The benefits of unionization may be especially large for Black workers, who are often exposed to the most dangerous workplace hazards, in nursing homes and writ large in U.S. workplaces.
• The findings in this report suggest that unionization improves health outcomes for workers and reduces racial health inequalities—dynamics consistent with broader research that links public health and racial equality to stronger economic growth.

Ros Reggans was overjoyed when she learned that her employer, a Chicago-area nursing home chain, had received more than $12 million in COVID-19 relief funds through the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act. But when she learned that the nursing home was not planning on using these funds to provide staff with more personal protective equipment, higher wages, and paid sick time, she organized her co-workers to go on strike.

“Our patients were dying, our co-workers were dying, and you’re gonna tell me there’s no support for our work? That didn’t feel right to me,” Reggans said. 1 For more than a week, 700 nurses, certified nursing assistants, dietary workers, and other support staff walked picket lines, undeterred by heavy snow and an intransigent boss. Reggans, a Black certified nursing assistant, is also a union steward for the Service Employees International Union. She saw the strike as the best way to advocate for what the staff and patients needed.

Eventually, they went back to work after receiving a modest raise, better access to the needed personal protective equipment, and bonus COVID-19 pay, a sum that allowed workers at the nursing home to stop moonlighting at multiple homes for extra money. They knew that they were at high risk of bringing COVID-19 from nursing home to nursing home and infecting patients in the process, but rent and grocery bills add up quickly on low wages. “That extra money we got wasn’t just for our pockets,” Reggans explained. “It’s pretty simple—the safer we are, the safer they are.” 2

The experience of Reggans and her union illustrates broader themes about labor unions and workplace safety that are important for understanding the past and future of public health crises.  Workers need labor unions because neither government regulations nor market forces are sufficient to protect workers. Although the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has improved workplace safety since its founding in 1971, thousands of workers are killed and millions are maimed at work each year in the United States. 3

Some economists and policymakers argue that market forces alone can help address worker safety problems. Specifically, they believe that those workers who are unhappy with working conditions can simply quit, thus incentivizing employers to improve workplace safety to retain workers. Relying on market mechanisms alone, however, is unlikely to meaningfully improve workplace safety because many workers find it difficult to quit even when facing poor working conditions.

There are many reasons why this is the case. These include market frictions, such as high unemployment, employers’ monopsony power—some firms’ monopoly-like control of labor market conditons in their industries or local labor markets—fear of losing health insurance tied to employment, and incomplete information about workplace safety hazards. All of these conditions make changing jobs burdensome. 4

In addition, workers may be deterred from moving themselves and their families to new job opportunities because of important family and community ties in their present location. 5 Under such circumstances, firms no longer need to compete to retain workers, and local labor markets become riddled with market failures, such as unsafe working conditions.

Our research shows that labor unions in one key sector of the care economy—nursing homes—can mitigate these market failures by providing workers with a voice in the workplace and enabling them to bargain collectively with their employers. Viewing workplace safety as a contingent and contested outcome allows us to identify different labor market institutions, such as unions, that contribute to better and safer jobs—not just in nursing homes, but across the U.S. economy as well.

This report details why safe worksites are often won through union-led struggles, not automatically generated by market competition, focusing on nursing homes and the broader U.S. economy. As we demonstrate below, the benefits of unionization may be especially large for Black workers, who are often exposed to the most dangerous workplace hazards, in nursing homes and writ large in U.S. workplaces. Our findings suggest that unionization improves health outcomes for workers and reduces racial health inequalities. These dynamics are consistent with broader research that links public health and racial equality to stronger economic growth. 6

Unions and workplace safety

Labor unions in the United States have long helped to improve U.S. workers’ safety and guarantee safe worksites. First, unionized workforces enjoy, on average, more comprehensive health insurance coverage, which can improve the overall health of workers and allow them to see doctors more regularly without worrying as much about out-of-pocket costs. 7

Second, unionized workers tend to report workplace safety hazards more frequently to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration because they have fewer fears of management reprisals for speaking up. Third, collective bargaining agreements frequently restrict excessive hours, mediate the pace of work, and enforce the use of personal protective equipment.

In the best-case scenario, workers can use such agreements to insert occupation-specific safety measures that can become permanent features of company policy. Research on unions in healthcare industries, for example, shows that unions improve workplace safety—and even patient outcomes—by securing safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, more paid sick leave, and reducing worker turnover. 8 Similarly, new research finds that the presence of a union made it more likely that OSHA investigators would conduct an inspection of an alleged violation. 9

The reverse is true, too. Research shows that policies that lead to de-unionization, such as so-called right-to-work legislation that is popular in Southern and Midwestern states, have significantly increased occupational fatalities. 10

Why unions made a difference in workplace safety amid the pandemic

The union difference was illuminated by the dangers of the pandemic workplace. COVID-19 is, among many things, an occupational disease because essential workers were disproportionately exposed and died at higher rates. During the first year of the pandemic, researchers find that 68 percent of COVID-induced fatalities among working-age adults were among low-wage workers in retail and service industry jobs. 11 A similar study finds that workers in essential industries were roughly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than were workers in nonessential industries. 12

Through strikes, walkouts, and protests, essential workers registered their discontent with the pandemic workplace. 13 Yet those complaints rarely translated to lasting changes unless they were backed up by a union. Unions were able to mitigate some of the most hazardous working conditions. During the pandemic, unionized workers across essential industries had greater access to paid sick leave and personal protective equipment, and were tested for COVID-19 more frequently. 14

Research also shows that unionized workers may be less likely to work multiple jobs and to live in settings associated with high COVID-19 transmission. 15 When COVID-19 first hit New York City in the spring of 2020, labor unions representing hospital workers worked closely with administrators and government agencies to rapidly expand hospital capacity while minimizing risk for workers. Unions helped secure access to necessary PPE supplies and ensured that all workers and volunteers were properly trained before being reassigned to new roles in the areas of greatest need. 16

Our own research shows that unions also worked to improve workplace safety in public schools. 17 We find that the average teachers union was associated with a 33 percent relative increase in the probability of a school district adopting a mask mandate. Our study focused on Iowa during the fall of 2020 because it was one of only 12 states that left the masking decision up to school districts at that time. Iowa was also an ideal state to study because its right-to-work law generates much higher district-level variation in unionization than is seen in states with more labor-friendly legislative environments.

We find that the leaders in Iowa’s teachers’ unions advocated for mask mandates through local school boards, a strategy that filled the policy vacuum in a state without a sweeping mask mandate. The following school year, when very few governors mandated masks in schools, this same strategy was pursued by teachers’ unions throughout the country. 18

Unions reduced the spread of COVID-19

To examine the relationship between unions and COVID-19 outcomes, our recent research focused on nursing homes, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States. The number of deaths from COVID-19 among nursing home residents and staff are greatly overrepresented in the U.S. pandemic death toll, accounting for one-fifth of all COVID-19 deaths to date. Yet this industry is also a dramatic example of the power of labor to safeguard public health.

First, we studied nursing homes in New York state during the first few months of the pandemic. Even after accounting for potential confounding factors, we find that the presence of a labor union was associated with 30 percent lower COVID-19 mortality rates for nursing home residents. 19 We also discovered that unionized nursing homes were more likely to provide workers with N95 respirators.

These safer working conditions were secured by unions negotiating with employers, organizing protests, and raising public awareness about PPE shortages. 20 These findings suggest that more PPE translated to differences between life and death among unionized and nonunionized long-term care homes during the early phase of the pandemic, when PPE shortages were more widespread.

We then extended this study to the continental United States, assessing whether the benefits of unionization continued from June 2020 through March 2021, the first full year of the pandemic. We find robust evidence that unions were associated with 10.8 percent lower COVID-19 mortality rates among nursing home residents across the country, as well as 6.8 percent lower COVID-19 infection rates among nursing home staff. 21 With more than 75,000 COVID-19 deaths among residents in nonunionized nursing homes during the period of our study, the results suggest that there would have been approximately 8,000 fewer resident deaths in less than 10 months if all nursing home facilities had been unionized.

These findings also suggest that the mechanisms by which unions reduced COVID-19 mortality rates extended well beyond providing personal protective equipment, which increasingly became easier to access over the study period we examined. While data limitations did not allow us to pin down these mechanisms, a variety of other factors may play a role in driving the union effect, including offering paid sick leave, limiting the number of workers employed at multiple facilities, or encouraging vaccination against COVID-19.

Our regression analysis focused on variation across individual nursing homes and controlled for numerous covariates, but the basic relationship between unions and lower worker COVID-19 infection rates can be seen in the county-level maps displayed in Figure 1. A comparison of these two maps reveals that regions with lower levels of nursing home unionization had higher worker COVID-19 infection rates, just as regions with higher levels of unionization had lower worker infection rates. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1 shows that the South, for example, had very few unionized nursing homes and high worker COVID-19 infection rates over that period of time. In contrast, the tristate area—made up of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—had high unionization rates and some of the country’s lowest worker infection rates. Figure 1 also clearly shows the geographical concentration of nursing home unionization rates, with the highest union density rates in a small number of counties in the Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest of the country.

Our research suggests that labor unions improved workplace safety in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers in other essential industries have been coming to a similar conclusion and have been requesting union elections at a record pace. 22  The recent union victory at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in Staten Island, NY, for example, grew out of worker protests demanding that the company do more to reduce the workplace spread of COVID-19.

Similarly, workers at Starbucks retail stores were often motivated to unionize by similar concerns about workplace safety, winning union elections in more than 200 stores nationwide in just the past 6 months. 23 And in the gig economy, a 2022 study of ride-hail drivers during the pandemic found that workers with greater exposure to COVID-19 were more likely to express interest in joining a labor union. 24

Labor unions provide additional health premiums for Black workers

Our research findings about labor unions and COVID-19 in nursing homes have particularly important implications for racial health equity. First, the nursing home workforce is disproportionately made up of Black and Hispanic women, demographic groups that have faced higher COVID-19 infection and mortality rates throughout the pandemic, as well as greater rates of economic precarity and poor health preceding it. 25 Nursing home unions therefore help to protect some of the country’s most vulnerable workers.

Second, the health benefits of unionization may be especially large for Black workers, as discriminatory managerial practices can expose them to the most dangerous workplace tasks. 26 And third, even before the pandemic, Black workers were less likely to work in jobs with employer-sponsored health insurance, a trend that was likely exacerbated by job losses in 2020. 27 Taken together, these racial disparities help us understand how discrimination and structural racism are entwined with employment in low-wage healthcare occupations.

“Black people are put in harm’s way in nursing homes,” explains Gloria Duquette, a Black Jamaican immigrant who works in three different nursing homes in Bloomfield, CT. “The bosses are White, the supervisors are White, but most of us direct caregivers are Black. Unions have rules in place for fairness, for balance. So, it makes it harder for supervisors to play favors with White workers or discriminate against Black workers.” 28

Similar to Duquette’s explanation, scholars have identified numerous ways in which labor unions may help Black workers address workplace discrimination. First, unions educate workers about their employment rights and help them identify illegal racial discrimination. 29 Second, unions reduce workers’ fear of retaliation for voicing dissatisfaction with such discrimination. 30 Third, many unionized workplaces have formal grievance procedures that enable workers to challenge discriminatory managerial practices. 31 Moreover, research shows that unions have the effect of reducing racial resentment among their White co-workers. 32

Labor unions secure especially large wage increases for workers of color. Economists Henry Farber and Ilyana Kuziemko at Princeton Universty, Daniel Herbst at the University of Arizona, and Suresh Naidu at Columbia University analyze data from 1936 through 2019 and find that the union wage premium was larger for non-White workers than White workers. 33 Similarly, sociologists Jasmine Kerrissey and Nathan Meyers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst examine public-sector wages and find that the benefits of union membership were largest for Black and women workers. 34 Shifting focus from wages to wealth, Christian Weller at U-Mass Boston and David Madland at the Center for American Progress find that the union premium is largest for Black union households. 35

In short, there are good reasons to believe that the benefits of unionization are especially large for Black workers—which, in turn, helps reduce U.S. wage inequality and boost more equitable economic growth.

While a rich empirical literature demonstrates that the union wage premium is larger for Black workers, few studies examine how the workplace safety benefits of unionization vary across worker demographics. We therefore conducted additional analysis of COVID-19 infection rates among workers in U.S. nursing homes to see whether this union “health premium” was larger in workplaces with higher proportions of Black workers.

To do so, we gathered new data at both the county and nursing home levels. For county-level worker data by race, we use the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators, which contains data on the county-level percentage of healthcare workers who are Black. For nursing-home-level worker data by race, we use recently developed estimates based on the characteristics of neighborhoods where nursing home staff reside. 36

To examine whether and how the union health premium varies across workers’ racial demographics, we built on our recent Health Affairs study of more than 13,000 U.S. nursing homes by assessing heterogeneity in the association between nursing home unions and worker COVID-19 infection rates. 37 We find that the union health premium is significantly larger for nursing homes with higher percentages of Black workers. 38

More specifically, we find that when the county-level percentage of healthcare workers who are Black is at its mean (15.7 percent), unions are associated with 6 percent lower worker COVID-19 infection rates. When the county-level percentage of workers who are Black is one standard deviation above the mean (29.4 percent), unions are associated with 14.3 percent lower worker COVID-19 infection rates. 39 (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2 demonstrates that the difference in worker COVID-19 infection rates in union and nonunion nursing homes grows more negative as the percentage of Black workers increases. In other words, the workplace health benefits of union membership during the pandemic were especially large in nursing homes with higher percentages of Black workers. 40

Conclusion and policy implications

Our research suggests that public health and well-being are linked to workers organizing into unions and thus ensuring higher labor standards. This overarching finding strengthens the case for policies that would bolster the power of U.S. workers to unionize and thereby improve workplace safety. The findings that unions provide especially large health premiums for all workers, but especially Black workers, should inform policy debates about how to alleviate the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on these workers.

Most importantly, our research provides strong evidence for the need to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO, Act, which cleared the U.S. House of Representatives in 2021 and now awaits a vote in the U.S. Senate. The legislation would update the Wagner Act, passed almost nine decades ago, and would restore workers’ right to organize without management interference by vastly reducing the obstacles that employers throw in their way.

There are a multitude of reasons to make it easier for workers to form unions. Recent research from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, for example, demonstrates that if the PRO Act were to facilitate unionization, it would increase workers’ wages and decrease income inequality. 41 Our research further bolsters the case for the PRO Act by demonstrating how unions improve workplace safety, highlighting the often-overlooked public health benefits of widespread unionization, especially for workers of color.

U.S. labor history—and the recent upsurges in union activity at corporations such as Amazon and Starbucks—shows that fair labor laws are not an absolute prerequisite for labor organizing. But the pandemic provided the context for a groundswell of interest in unions among the general public and U.S. workers themselves. 42 The PRO Act would make it easier for average workers to improve their jobs, a compelling rationale given lax workplace safety enforcement and the failure of labor markets to consistently deliver safe jobs.

While our research demonstrates the power of unions to improve health and safety, workers still need strong policy measures to ensure an adequate level of safety on the job. Less than 10 percent of all U.S. workers are union members, which means that ensuring greater workplace safety requires large-scale policymaking beyond the right to organize. Despite pressure from Congress and a lawsuit by the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration refuses to make any permanent protocols specific to occupational exposure to COVID-19 or regulations about airborne infectious diseases. Instead, it issued voluntary guidance with loopholes large enough for the biggest U.S. companies to easily slide through.

In June 2021, the agency finally issued an Emergency Temporary Standard on airborne infectious diseases. But that regulation was hobbled soon after by the U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent rejection of the OSHA “vaccine or test” mandate at certain workplaces. 43 A permanent standard on airborne infectious diseases—akin to the 2000 bloodborne pathogen standard that improved worker safety in the wake of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and the 2014 Ebola outbreak—would create enforceable legal protections for workers in industries that face significant health risks to infectious disease such as COVID-19.

Workplace safety is a crucial component of a healthy and productive economy that generates sustainable and equitable growth. But neither labor market competition nor our current underresourced regulatory framework guarantees safe workplaces. Instead, our research stresses the need for specific policy interventions that can help workers build power from the bottom up. The right to unionize and the right to a safe workplace have been eroded. Public health and safety require that workers win them back.

About the authors

Adam Dean is an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. His research focuses on international trade and labor politics, as well as the socioeconomic determinants of public health. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, his M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. His second book, Opening Up By Cracking Down , was published by Cambridge University Press in October 2020.

Jamie McCallum  is an associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. His research focuses on work and labor issues in the United States and the Global South. His third book,  Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice , was published by Basic Books in November 2022.

Atheendar Venkataramani is an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennasylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the director of the Opportunity for Health Lab at Perelman. His research focuses on health and socioeconomic inequality—specifically, the effects of economic opportunities on health behaviors and outcomes, the effects of early life interventions on adult health and well-being, and the role of social policies and structural factors in shaping population health. Venkataramani received his Ph.D. in health policy and economics from Yale University in 2009 and his M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2011.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Service Employees International Union for sharing data with us on the union status of U.S. nursing homes.

1. Jamie McCallum, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Struggle for Worker Justice (New York: Basic Books, forthcoming.)

3. David Michaels and Jordan Barab, “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration at 50: Protecting Workers in a Changing Economy,” American Journal of Public Health 110 (5) (2020): 631–635, available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7144438/ .

4. Ann Rosenthal, “Death by inequality: How workers’ lack of power harms their health and safety” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2021), available at https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/death-by-inequality-how-workers-lack-of-power-harms-their-health-and-safety/ .

5. Rebecca Diamond, “The Determinants and Welfare Implications of US Workers’ Diverging Location Choices by Skill: 1980-2000,” American Economic Review 106 (3) (2016): 479–524.

6. David E. Bloom and others, “Health and economic growth: reconciling the micro and macro evidence.” Working Paper No. w26003 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2019); Dora Costa and Richard H. Steckel, “Long-term trends in health, welfare, and economic growth in the United States.” In Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud, eds., Health and welfare during industrialization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 47–90; Gopi Shah Goda, and Evan J. Soltas, “The Impacts of Covid-19 Illnesses on Workers.” Working Paper No. 30435 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022); Robert Lynch, “The economic benefits of equal opportunity in the United States by ending racial, ethnic, and gender disparities” (Washington: Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 2022).

7. Thomas C. Buchmueller, John DiNardo, and Robert G. Valletta, “Union effects on health insurance provision and coverage in the United States,” ILR Review 55 (4) (2002): 610–627; Jacob Goldin, Ithai Z. Lurie, and Janet McCubbin, “Health insurance and mortality: Experimental evidence from taxpayer outreach,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 136 (1) (2021): 1–49.

8. Michael Ash and Jean Ann Seago, “The Effect of Registered Nurses’ Unions on Heart-Attack Mortality,” ILR Review 57 (3) (2004): 422–42, available at https://doi.org/10.1177/001979390405700306 ; Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Owen Thompson, “Nurse Unions and Patient Outcomes,” ILR Review 69 (4) (2016): 803–33, available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793916644251 ; Linda H. Aiken and others, “Hospital nurse staffing and patient mortality, nurse burnout, and job dissatisfaction,” JAMA 288 (16) (2002): 1987–93, available at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/195438 ; J. Spetz, “ Nursing wage premiums in large hospitals: what explains the size-wage effect” AHSR FHSR Annu Meet Abstr 13 (1996): 100–1.

9. Aaron Sojourner and Jooyoung Yang, “Effects of Union Certification on Workplace-Safety Enforcement: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence,” ILR Review 75 (2) (2022): 373–401, available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793920953089 .

10. Michael Zoorob, “Does ‘Right to Work’ Imperil the Right to Health? The Effect of Labour Unions on Workplace Fatalities,” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 75 (10) (2018): 736–738, available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29898957/ .

11. Elizabeth B. Pathak and others, “Joint Effects of Socioeconomic Position, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender on COVID-19 Mortality among Working-Age Adults in the United States,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19 (9) (2022): 5479, available at https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095479 .

12. Chen, Yea-Hung and others, “COVID-19 mortality among working-age Americans in 46 states, by industry and occupation,” medRxiv (2022).

13. McCallum, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice .

14. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and others, “Understanding the COVID-19 Workplace: Evidence from a Survey of Essential Workforce” (New York: Roosevelt Institute, 2020), available at https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_SurveryofEssentialWorkers_IssueBrief_202006-1.pdf .

15. M. Keith Chen, Judith A. Chevalier, and Elisa F. Long, “Nursing Home Staff Networks and COVID-19,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (1) (2020), available at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2015455118 ; Hertel-Fernandez and others, “Understanding the COVID-19 Workplace: Evidence from a Survey of Essential Workforce”; Monita Karmakar, Paula M. Lantz, and Renuka Tipirneni, “Association of Social and Demographic Factors with COVID-19 Incidence and Death Rates in the US,” JAMA Network Open 4 (1) (2021): e2036462, available at https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.36462 .

16. Chris Keeley and others, “Staffing Up For The Surge: Expanding The New York City Public Hospital Workforce During The COVID-19 Pandemic,” Health Affairs 39 (8) (2020): 1426–1430.

17. Adam Dean and others, “Iowa school districts were more likely to adopt COVID-19 mask mandates where teachers were unionized,” Health Affairs 40 (8) (2021):1270–6.

18. Adam Dean and Jamie McCallum, “Strong teachers unions and school mask mandates go together,” The Monkey Cage Blog, The Washington Post , August 20, 2021, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/20/strong-teachers-unions-school-mask-mandates-go-together-our-research-finds/ .

19. Our regression model adjusts for county-level population and COVID-19 infections per capita. At the nursing home level, we adjust for the average age and acuity of residents, the percentage of residents whose primary support comes from Medicaid or Medicare, whether a nursing home is part of a chain or run for-profit, the percentage of residents who are White, the occupancy rate, and the staff-to-resident ratios for registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and certified nursing assistants.

20. Audrey McNamara, “Nurses across the country protest lack of protective equipment,” CBS News, March 28, 2020, available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-care-workers-protest-lack-of-protective-equipment-2020-03-28/ .

21. Our regression model adjusted for the same covariates as the New York study discussed above.

22. National Labor Relations Board Office of Public Affairs, “Correction: First Three Quarters’ Union Election Petitions Up 58%, Exceeding All FY21 Petitions Filed,” Press release, July 15, 2022, available at https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/correction-first-three-quarters-union-election-petitions-up-58-exceeding .

23. “Current Starbucks Statistics,” available at https://unionelections.org/data/starbucks/ (last accessed September 20, 2022).

24. Michael David Maffie, “The global ‘hot shop’: COVID‐19 as a union organising catalyst,” Industrial Relations Journal (2022), available at https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12367 .

25. David P. Bui and others, “Racial and ethnic disparities among COVID-19 cases in workplace outbreaks by industry sector—Utah, March 6–June 5, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69 (33) (2020): 1133, available at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6933e3.htm ; Kathryn E. W. Himmelstein and Atheendar S. Venkataramani, “Economic vulnerability among US female health care workers: potential impact of a $15-per-hour minimum wage,” American Journal of Public Health 109 (2) (2019): 198–205, available at https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304801 .

26. Elizabeth A. Deitch and others, “Subtle yet significant: The existence and impact of everyday racial discrimination in the workplace,” Human Relations 56 (11) (2003): 1299–1324, available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267035611002 ; Desta Fekedulegn and others, “Prevalence of workplace discrimination and mistreatment in a national sample of older US workers: The REGARDS cohort study,” SSM-Population Health 8 (2019): 100444, available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100444 .

27. Marsha Lillie-Blanton and Catherine Hoffman, “The role of health insurance coverage in reducing racial/ethnic disparities in health care,” Health Affairs 24 (2) (2005): 398–408.

28. Interview conducted by Jamie McCallum.

29. Elizabeth Hirsh and Christopher J. Lyons, “Perceiving discrimination on the job: Legal consciousness, workplace context, and the construction of race discrimination,” Law & Society Review 44 (2) (2010): 269–298, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/40783656 .

30. Richard B. Freeman, “Individual mobility and union voice in the labor market,” The American Economic Review 66 (2) (1976): 361–368, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1817248 .

31. Frank Dobbin, Daniel Schrage, and Alexandra Kalev, “Rage against the iron cage: The varied effects of bureaucratic personnel reforms on diversity,” American Sociological Review 80 (5) (2015): 1014–1044, available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122415596416 .

32. Paul Frymer and Jacob M. Grumbach, “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics,” American Journal of Political Science 65 (1) (2021): 225–240, available at https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/pfrymer/files/ajps12537_rev.pdf .

33. Henry S. Farber and others, “Unions and inequality over the twentieth century: New evidence from survey data,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 136 (3) (2021): 1325–1385, available at https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab012 .

34. Jasmine Kerrissey and Nathan Meyers, “Public-Sector Unions as Equalizing Institutions: Race, Gender, and Earnings,” ILR Review (2021), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939211056914 .

35. Christian E. Weller and David Madland, “Unions, Race, Ethnicity, and Wealth: Is There a Union Wealth Premium for People of Color?” Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy 5 (1) (2022): 25–40, available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-020-00078-7 .

36. Karen Shen, “Relationship between nursing home COVID-19 outbreaks and staff neighborhood characteristics,” PLOS ONE 17 (4) (2022): e0267377, available at https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.10.20192203 . This data is only available for 18 U.S. states.

37. We estimate a cross-sectional negative binomial regression model. Our results are similar when we include additional interaction terms between the percentage of nursing home workers who are Black and each of our nursing-home-level covariates, as well as when we include interactions between unionization and all other covariates.

38. We find that the coefficient for the interaction between the presence of a union and the percentage of workers who are Black is negative and statistically significant.

39. These estimates are based on the county-level QWI measure of worker race. When using our nursing-home-level measure of worker race, which is only available for 18 U.S. states, we find similar results. When the percentage of workers who are Black is at its mean (18.3 percent), unions are associated with 4.4 percent lower worker COVID-19 infection rates. When the percentage of workers who are Black is one standard deviation above the mean (34 percent), unions are associated with 10.5 percent lower worker COVID-19 infection rates.

40. We also find that the union health premium is larger for Hispanic workers than White workers, but the difference is not statistically significant. This null effect may be driven by a lack of statistical power, as the mean and standard deviation for Hispanic workers (5.11 percent and 6.76 percent, respectively) are considerably smaller than those for Black workers (15.77 percent and 13.75 percent, respectively).

41. Kate Bahn and Corey Husak, “The PRO Act addresses income inequality by boosting the organizing power of U.S. workers” (Washington: The Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 2020); Farber and others, “Unions and inequality over the twentieth century: New evidence from survey data.”

42. McCallum, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice ; Maffie, “The global ‘hot shop’: COVID‐19 as a union organising catalyst.”

43. U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Occupational Exposure to COVID-19; Emergency Temporary Standard” (Washington: U.S. Department of Labor, 2021), available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/06/21/2021-12428/occupational-exposure-to-covid-19-emergency-temporary-standard/ ; Bruce Rolfsen and Robert Iafolla, “Biden’s Shot-or-Test Rule Abandoned After Supreme Court Loss (2),” Bloomberg Law , January 25, 2022, available at https://news.bloomberglaw.com/safety/covid-19-shot-or-test-regulation-to-be-withdrawn-by-bidens-osha .

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WHAT DO GOVERNMENT UNIONS DO? PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS AND NONUNION WAGES, 1977-2015

Jake rosenfeld.

Washington University-St. Louis

Patrick Denice

University of Western Ontario

In this article we investigate the connection between public sector union memberships and nonunion worker pay. We leverage nearly four decades of Current Population Survey (CPS) data on millions of U.S. workers to test whether public sector union density, measured at the state-level, is associated with higher average wages among unorganized workers. We find stable and substantively large positive effects of state-level public sector union strength on nonunion public sector workers’ wages. These results are robust to the inclusion of a range of state-level controls, including GDP, average educational attainment, public sector size, and the strength of private sector unions. Analyses of public sector unions and nonunion private sector pay reveal a robust positive relationship – but one limited to women, revealing how occupational segregation interacts with pay-setting institutions to influence wage outcomes.

INTRODUCTION

Recent research on organized labor and inequality has focused on private sector unions and private sector workers. This is especially true for research on union spillover effects. The latest studies on the topic contend that union decline is a core determinant of wage trends for many workers, not only through the wage losses experienced by formerly organized workers, but also through the positive “spillover” effects strong unions once provided unorganized workers ( Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 ; Western and Rosenfeld 2011 ). Spillover effects can operate through various channels, including through the well-documented threat effects a strong union presence exerts on nonunion employers ( Farber 2005 ; Leicht 1989 ; Podgursky 1986 ). In addition to threat effects, Western and Rosenfeld (2011 : 517-519) outline cultural, political, and institutional channels. Importantly, both the theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence of this research on union spillovers highlights the key role private sector unions once played in propping up wages among unorganized, private sector workers.

Yet decades of union decline in the private sector has produced a contemporary union movement evenly split between its public and private sector memberships. And while wage stagnation has been most pronounced in the private sector, especially among men lacking a college degree, years of “new governance” restructuring and state funding cutbacks have eroded the economic standing of many government employees ( Cohen and Gebeloff 2018 ; Laird 2017 ; Wilson, Rosigno, and Huffman 2015 ). These developments merit a fresh examination of public sector union spillover effects. In this article, we provide an extensive investigation into the connection between public sector union power and nonunion worker pay. We leverage nearly four decades of data on millions of U.S. workers to test whether public sector union density, measured at the state-level, helps raise average wages among unorganized workers in both the public and private sectors. Given that public sector unions are now “driving the American labor movement” ( Moe 2006 : 5), a focus on their abilities to buttress the pay of nonunion workers speaks to ongoing debates about economic inequality. And unlike their private sector counterparts, with few exceptions, public sector unions are concentrated in disproportionately female-dominated occupations. In 2015, nearly two-thirds of private sector union members were men, compared to just over 40% of public sector union members. Existing theory suggests union spillovers are largest within the industries and occupations with sizable union memberships. Public sector unions’ effects on nonunion pay are therefore likely concentrated in female-dominated occupations. A focus on public sector union spillover effects carries implications for ongoing debates about gender pay disparities in the contemporary economy.

Our investigation is empirically innovative in a few key ways. First, in all of our analyses we include controls for private sector union strength. Second, unlike other treatments on the topic ( Frandsen 2016 ; Ichniowki, Freeman, and Lauer 1989 ; Zwerling and Thomason 1995 ), we investigate spillover effects for all non-managerial workers, not just those in specific occupations like teaching, policing, and fire protection. Third, we focus on public sector union strength, measured by state-level membership rates, instead of the presence or absence of state laws permitting collective bargaining in the public sector. Fourth, we analyze data on decades of state-level public sector unionization, instead of restricting our analysis to a single year ( Belman, Heywood, and Lund 1997 ). And fifth, ours is the first investigation to test for public sector spillovers to private sector, nonunion workers.

This last empirical innovation requires a theoretical underpinning. Recent research on labor and inequality either ignores the role of public sector unions ( Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 ; Western and Rosenfeld 2011 ), or suggests that private and public sector unions exist in tension with one another, and that public sector unions are unlikely to have similar effects on nonunion workers as private sector ones ( Ahlquist 2012 ; DiSalvo 2015 ). Research in this vein emphasizes the tax burden for nonunion private sector workers that may result from outsized public sector union contracts. And while an earlier literature found substantial spillover effects within the public sector ( Belman, Heywood, and Lund 1997 ; Zwerling and Thomason 1995 ), none has investigated whether union power in the public sector spills over into similar occupations in the nonunion private sector. Instead, researchers tend to emphasize how public-private compensation comparisons are difficult given the unique nature – and therefore lack of comparability – of certain public sector occupations, especially the protective services ( Lewin, Keefe, and Kochan 2012 : 773).

Policing and fire protection are two occupations without clear private sector corollaries. But other large occupations in the government sector, such as teachers, custodians, and administrative assistants, have plenty of private sector counterparts. Are the salaries of private school teachers or custodians in private facilities affected by prevailing wages in the public sector? Especially in places where public sector unions are strong? We suggest they are, and situate public sector unions at the center of recent developments in public and private sector earnings, arguing that the same channels through which private sector unions may influence nonunion private sector pay should operate for public sector unions as well.

Yet a key difference between public and private sector union memberships is their gender composition ( Rosenfeld 2014 : Table 2.5). Unlike in the private sector, women are overrepresented in public sector unions because public sector unions concentrate in disproportionately-female occupations. Research on gender pay gaps and the public sector finds that government employment offers women an earnings premium in the U.S. ( Gornick and Jacobs 1998 : Table 5), with smaller overall gender pay gaps than found in the private sector ( Mandel and Semyonov 2014 ). We argue that public sector institutions can help buttress the pay of private sector female earnings. Thus our analysis speaks to ongoing research on gender earnings inequality as well as institutional accounts of wage stagnation and inequality in the contemporary U.S. Researchers contend that the public sector and union employment serve as “protectionist” pockets that offer some refuge from the broader labor market that historically has disadvantaged women and racial/ethnic minorities ( Laird 2017 ; Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2012 ). We suggest that when it comes to pay for women, the “protections” public sector unions provide extend to places in the nonunion private sector where government unions are strong.

To foreshadow our results, we find substantial spillover effects among nonunion public sector workers. Our analyses of public sector unions and nonunion private sector pay reveal a robust positive relationship – but one limited to women. We also find that public sector union spillovers vary by occupation, with some of the largest effects in the public sector in fire, police, and protection and transportation occupations. Among private sector nonunion women, the largest spillover effects are among teachers, financial sales, and management-related occupations.

PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS

With few exceptions (such as the railway industry), federal law – most notably, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) – governs collective bargaining in the private sector. There is no corollary federal legislation for public sector unions. Public sector unions emerged later than private sector ones, partly as a result of state-level actions granting varying degrees of license for state and local government workers to bargain with their employers. Researchers disagree about the relative impact of these state-level policy decisions on initial public sector union growth, with some arguing that the legislation was decisive ( Freeman 1986 ), and others suggesting that organization and mobilization among government employees often preceded and helped precipitate union-friendly state laws ( Belman, Heywood, and Lund 1997 ; Goldfield and Bromsen 2013 ). But there is little debate about the contemporary correlation between public sector union power and the comprehensiveness (or lack thereof) of state laws governing collective bargaining ( Farber 2005 ; Freeman and Han 2012 ). Certain states, such as North Carolina, bar collective bargaining between government employees and state agencies. Other states such as New York grant nearly all the rights private sector unions enjoy under the NLRA to their state and local employees. Today, states like North and South Carolina, where government workers enjoy few rights to bargain collectively with their employers, have public sector unionization rates 1/7 th and 1/10 th that of New York.

Not only do public sector unionization rates vary across states, they vary by level of government. Unionization rates in the public sector are higher at the local and state levels than they are at the federal level. Across all states and years in our data, approximately 41% of public sector workers at the local level are unionized, 29% are unionized at the state level, and 17% are unionized at the federal level.

These rates have held relatively steady across the past few decades – a period in which private sector organization rates plummeted. Why the divergent fates between public and private sector unions? The passage of union-friendly policies at the state-level signifies an employer – the government – “amenable to labor unions, and thus unlikely to fight unionization drives” ( Rosenfeld 2014 : 34; see also Freeman 1988 : 70-72), leading to an initial upsurge in organizing campaigns across major public sector occupations such as teachers in the 1960s and 1970s. And until very recently, elected officials in states with high public sector densities have been unwilling to erode government unions’ gains, unlike the concerted, sustained attack launched by employers against organized labor in the private sector.

SPILLOVER EFFECTS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Much of the early research on union spillovers examines whether a union presence poses an economic threat to nonunion competitors ( Farber 2005 ; Leicht 1989 ; Podgursky 1986 ). A strong union presence can threaten the economic well-being of a nonunion establishment in two primary ways. First, it may spark a unionization effort at the employer’s plant. To avoid this outcome, nonunion employers may raise their pay and benefits packages to match union levels. This strategy was once common, with industry leaders such as Eastman Kodak monitoring and matching union pay scales closely in order to placate its nonunion workforce ( Jacoby 1997 ). Second, a strong union presence may attract nonunion workers to the higher pay that often accompanies a union job. Narrowing pay differentials between the union and nonunion ranks should reduce the prospects of losing talented workers to an organized establishment. More recently, scholars have suggested that the potential influence of unions on nonunion pay extends beyond economic threat. Western and Rosenfeld’s (2011 : 517-519) broader categorization includes cultural, political, and institutional channels. Culturally, the broad “norms of economic fairness” (Ahlquist 2017: 412) a powerful labor movement may advance should operate to the benefit of average nonunion workers. Politically, unions’ push for higher minimum wages, to take one prominent example, raises the pay of bottom-rung occupations within industries. The institutional channel also helps boost wages within occupations. In 2015, New York State’s Fast Food Wage Board, which included a Secretary Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), recommended increasing fast-food employees’ pay to $15/hour, significantly raising compensation levels for the food service occupation within the fast food industry.

We suggest that the theoretical mechanisms connecting union power to nonunion government workers’ pay are similar to those outlined in the private sector union literature. Threat effects, for example, should operate similarly in unorganized public sector establishments. So too should the political channel, as powerful public sector unions often lobby to raise standards among a broad range of workers, not simply those belonging to public sector unions. These various pathways through which unions boost nonunion pay in existing studies, as in the present one, are largely unobserved (although some of our supplemental models do include tests of political channels). Instead, we observe union power, proxied by public sector membership rates at the state-level, alongside workers’ wages and a range of other individual- and state-level determinants of pay. What is important for our purposes is not which mechanism is most impactful, but whether we find evidence for the presence of public sector union spillovers, including among private sector workers.

Most of the existing research on union spillovers focuses on private sector dynamics. But a few studies have documented spillovers from public sector unions to nonunion public sector workers. Belman, Heywood, and Lund (1997 ; but see Waters et al. 1994 ), for example, analyze Current Population Data (CPS) for 1991 and find that a 10 point increase in a state’s public sector unionization rate is associated with a 4% increase in nonunion state workers’ wages. They also find substantial spillovers among unorganized employees of local governments. Zax and Ichniowski (1988) likewise find evidence that nonunion workers in municipalities with a strong government union presence earn more than similar public sector workers in municipalities without a union presence.

PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS AND PRIVATE SECTOR WORKERS

To the extent that researchers have hypothesized about possible spillovers from public sector unions to private sector workers, the presumed effects are negative. The wage premiums and generous benefits powerful public sector unions secure, if coupled with stable (or increasing) public sector employee levels, may strain budgets and precipitate higher taxes ( DiSalvo 2015 ). Other research counters that the moving van and ballot box help check outlandish demands by public sector unions, as taxpayers can simply relocate to less-costly environs or pressure their elected representatives to abrogate contracts ( Freeman 1986 ; but see Bruekner and Neumark 2014 ). In a recent study Freeman and Han (2012) test these competing expectations by examining the fiscal impact of government unions in a state-level analysis of budget deficits and public sector union strength. Using data from 2001 to 2010, the authors find a positive relationship between public sector union density and deficits, although they stress the effect is “modest” and limited to certain model specifications (398). In a similar analysis focused on the recessionary years of 2009 and 2010, Allegretto, Jacobs, and Lucia (2011) also estimate a modest positive relationship between government unions and budget deficits. However, including a measure of changes in housing prices renders the union effect statistically non-significant.

Even if public sector unions are not major drivers of state budget deficits, they still may not have any positive spillover effects on the largest segment of the workforce - nonunion, private sector employees. Some analysts suggest that public sector unions lack the interest or capabilities to improve the working conditions and lift the wages of unorganized private sector workers ( Ahlquist 2012 ; Gunderson 2005 ). Ahlquist argues that government employee unions are incapable “of using their own position to provide an effective floor for wages and working conditions elsewhere in the economy… ” and that there is not “much direct political activity by public sector unions on behalf of private sector workers” (2012: 2-7). The perception that public sector unions are self-interested rent extractors helped spark backlash among private sector nonunion workers, contributing to these unions’ recent troubles in certain states ( Cramer 2014 ). As Cramer (2016 : 143) discovered in her interviews with Wisconsinites, resentment toward the state’s public employees stemmed in part from the bureaucrats’ connection to “greedy” public sector unions. From this perspective, then, the normative, economic, and political mechanisms through which the labor movement has been found to lift the wages of nonunion workers are limited to unions in the private sector.

We challenge this argument. We contend that public sector unions potentially influence nonunion private sector wages through similar channels as private sector unions. Take the two variations of threat effects, in which employers match union pay scales to avoid a unionization drive or to retain workers otherwise tempted by higher-paying jobs in organized establishments. While the vast majority of fulltime teachers in 2015 (over three million) work in public schools, nearly 500,000 are employed in private schools ( National Center for Education Statistics 2016 : Table 205.40). And while a majority of these are employed in religious schools, perhaps limiting threat effects, approximately 1/3 work for nonsectarian schools. Healthcare is another field in which there is a sizable public sector unionized workforce as well as a large number of nonunion, private sector employees. And beyond the professions, research suggests that comparatively low-paid occupations such as office assistant, janitor, and bus driver earn more in government workplaces, due in part to the contracts public sector unions are able to secure ( DiSalvo 2015 ). There is no theoretical reason why private employers in locales with strong public sector unions would not feel threatened by a possible organizing drive or by losing employees to better-paying jobs in the public sector. After all, many unions today, including the SEIU, are comprised of mixed memberships that cross sectors. And many public sector establishments offer greater pay transparency than in the private sector, providing nonunion private sector workers with a clear benchmark for pay comparisons ( Rosenfeld 2017 ).

Regarding the norms that a powerful labor movement may establish, here too we believe that public sector unions play a similar role as that hypothesized for private sector unions. During the fiscal-crises of the 1970s, many private employers sought to weaken public sector unions, worried about the standards these organizations were setting for workers in nonunion, private sector firms ( Fraser and Freeman 2011 : 95). And public sector unions have been active players in political efforts that would benefit unorganized private sector workers. For example, in 2007, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and other public sector unions contributed to the effort to pass a living wage ordinance for big box retailers in Chicago ( Hennessy 2013 : 488). The National Education Association (NEA) – the largest labor union in the U.S. with nearly three million members – has lobbied on behalf of federal efforts to raise the minimum wage, including the 2014 Minimum Wage Fairness Act. 1 SEIU has been instrumental in providing the organizational and financial resources behind the “Fight for 15” campaign on behalf of low-wage workers ( Andrias 2016 ). Much of the criticism of public sector unions as purely self-serving political organizations seems to stem from the actions of the protective services. But there are nearly as many building cleaning and pest control workers in the public sector as there are police officers. And the number of administrative and office employees working for state, local, and federal governments far exceeds the total number of firefighters in the U.S.

There is likely a difference in who benefits from a strong public sector union presence compared to a strong private sector union presence. In the private sector, once-heavily unionized occupations such as construction, transportation, and steel manufacturing are disproportionately male. In the public sector, heavily unionized occupations that lack private sector counterparts, in particular the protective services, are also disproportionately male. Heavily unionized public sector occupations with analogous private sector workers, such as teaching, nursing, and administrative assistants, are, by contrast, overwhelmingly female. According to the CPS, in 2015 over four-fifths of elementary and middle school teachers were women, as were 90% of licensed registered nurses. Thus gender segregation combined with union strength in the public sector should operate to influence the pay of female-dominated occupations in the private sector. As a result, compared to men, unorganized private sector women should benefit from a strong public sector union presence.

Another critical distinction between public and private sector unions, we suggest, is the level at which spillover effects likely operate. The interstate heterogeneity in policies regulating public sector unions suggest to us that any effects public sector unions may have on private sector wages are contained within states. Moreover, requirements and licensing for certain large public sector occupations also vary by state. Take teaching: a teacher transferring to an out-of-state district must navigate a new set of licensing rules and regulations, and, depending on the state he or she is transferring from, may have to pass an additional set of tests. Such state-specific factors likely mean that private sector employers and employees looking at public sector wages as guideposts do so within states, not across such disparate policy and regulatory contexts. Political channels through which public sector unions might influence nonunion wages are also largely bound by state or sub-state borders, such as state-level minimum wage campaigns or living wage ordinances at the municipal level.

Thus our investigation tests whether state-level public sector unionization rates affect the pay of public and private sector nonunion workers. We do not disaggregate further by occupation. This is due largely to data constraints: using our core 26-occupation measure would result in a state-by-occupation analysis with 1,326 state-occupations, 2 with cell count sizes far too small to generate meaningful results in many state-occupations. We suggest that our approach is conservative, as we are not focusing our analysis on workers in the same occupation, where spillover effects are most likely to be the largest. Based on the preceding discussion, we hypothesize that public sector union density at the state-level is positively correlated with nonunion public sector pay for men and women, and with nonunion private sector wages for women.

DATA AND METHODS

We rely on various series of the CPS as the primary data source used in our analyses. The CPS is a monthly survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of between fifty- and sixty-thousand households, and is commonly used to investigate wage trends and the role of unions given its rich set of economic and demographic variables and large samples. The CPS began asking respondents about union membership in its 1973 May survey. Our analyses begin in 1977 for two reasons. One, the CPS did not include a full set of state identifiers until the 1977 May survey. Two, the CPS altered the wording of the union question beginning in 1977, rendering comparisons with earlier years problematic, especially in analyses of public sector unions ( Hirsch and Macpherson 2003 : 351). We end our series in 2015 because core measures of state economic prosperity and economic growth, GDP per capita and GDP growth rates, are only available through 2015. Beginning in 1983, the CPS included its union question in the larger Outgoing Rotation Group (ORG) files. For 1977-1981 we use the May files, and for 1983-2015 we use the ORG files (we exclude 1982 data as no union question was asked in that year).

Following recent research on related topics, we limit our samples to fulltime (those working 30+ hours per week), nonunion employees with positive earnings who are not self-employed or senior managers or executives ( Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 ). We exclude senior managers and executives, as our focus is on wage trends among average American workers. We drop outlier earners from our samples by excluding respondents reporting hourly earnings below $1/hour or above $100/hour in 1979 dollars ( Lemieux 2006 ). We omit allocated earners from our data since the CPS does not include union status or sector in its allocation model ( Brueckner and Neumark 2014 : 210). To identify allocated earners across the 1977-2015 series, we follow the procedure outlined by Hirsch and Schumacher (2004 : Table 2). No valid allocation flags exist for 1994 and for three-quarters of the 1995 surveys. Given this, we exclude all 1994 data and retain only those respondents from the 1995 survey with valid allocation flags.

Constructing a real weekly wage series from 1977 to 2015 requires adjusting for inflation and top-coded values. We convert weekly wages to 2015 dollars using a hybrid deflator. We use the CPI-U-X1 for 1977-1978 and the CPI-U-RS for 1979-2015 ( Baker 2007 ). For the results presented in the tables, we follow Lemieux (2006) and multiply the weekly wages of respondents with top-coded earnings by 1.4. In supplemental analyses we experimented with other approaches, including multiplying top-coded values by the Pareto estimates of mean earnings above the top-code provided by Hirsch and Macpherson (2017) . We also modeled median weekly wages, thus avoiding the need to adjust top-coded values. Both sets of supplemental analyses produced results similar to those shown and are available upon request.

Our individual-level covariates, drawn from the CPS files, include education (4-category measure), potential experience and its square 3 , race/ethnicity (5-category variable), metropolitan status (3-category), region, and hours worked per week. We generate a 26-category occupation measure based on a time-consistent system developed by Autor and Dorn (2013) and Dorn (2009) . We provide a full list of the occupations in the Data Appendix . Occupations with a disproportionate fraction of government employees include professionals (excluding teachers and nurses, who comprise their own categories), janitorial workers, fire / police / correctional workers (over 98% are in the public sector), and teachers. Occupations with comparatively few government workers include retail sales workers, financial sales workers, and miners (nearly all of whom are in the private sector).

Our primary independent variable is a state-level measure of public sector union density for each state-year. The numerator is the total number of public sector union members employed in a state for each year, based off of the CPS item asking respondents whether they are a member of a labor union or employee association similar to a union. The denominator represents the total number of employed public sector respondents who are not self-employed in that state per year. A major empirical challenge in estimating public sector spillover effects is the lack of temporal variation in unionization rates, at least for the years in which state-level data is available. We cannot include state fixed-effects since 94% of the variation in public sector unionization is between-state at the state-year level. For this reason, it is imperative to include a rich set of state-level covariates that may be jointly correlated with both public sector union strength and average wage levels for nonunion workers. Our models adjust for private sector density at the state-level, given the strong correlation between public and private sector membership rates ( Goldfield and Bromsen 2013 ; Kochan 1973 ). If public sector union strength is correlated with a state’s relative prosperity, estimates of public sector union effects on wages that lack controls for the economic health of the state will be biased. We adjust for state prosperity with measures of the percentage of residents with a BA or higher, a lagged measure of the state’s employment rate, GDP per capita (in real 2015 dollars), and the GDP annual growth rate. GDP per capita should proxy for a state’s general cost of living and affluence while the employment and GDP growth rates capture short-term business cycle effects ( Brady, Baker, and Finnigan 2013 : 879). Our state GDP measures are drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We modify their measure by excluding the labor compensation component since this is a function of our dependent variable (workers’ wages).

We also control for public sector size. Existing research is mixed as to whether public sector unions raise overall government employment levels ( Trejo 1991 ; Anzia and Moe 2015 ), but if unions pursue this strategy in bargaining, the greater number of employees to pay may translate to lower wages within the public sector. Two final state-level covariates help us adjust for the impacts of other dominant explanations for wage stagnation in the modern economy. To control for manufacturing decline associated with the opening up of global trade, we include a measure of the percentage of workers in each state in the manufacturing industry. To control for technological change and the automation of many jobs, we include an index measuring the routine task content of each occupation to adjust for that occupation’s risk of automation ( Autor and Dorn 2013 ). This index increases from 0 to 10 in the prevalence of routine tasks in each occupation. 4 We then aggregate this index to the state-level by calculating the average routine task content among all workers in each state and year.

Following recent related studies that include state-level predictors (see Bahrami, Bitzan, and Leitch 2009 ; Brady, Baker, and Finnigan 2013 ), we do not include cost of living indicators. 5 Cost of living data are not available for our full observation period. And while cost of living measures based on variation in prices for housing and goods generally overstate true cost differences, controlling for region (as we do) can serve as a good proxy for cost of living variation ( Dumond, Hirsch, and Macpherson 1999 ). There is a lot of variation in cost of living within states, and a state-level cost of living measure would mask this variation. Finally, our models already include measures that partially capture cost of living differences. For instance, GDP and cost of living are positively correlated. At the state-year level, we calculate a correlation of .55 between GDP and cost of living. California, in 2010, ranked 11th on our measure of GDP and 8th on our measure of cost of living; other states also have similar rankings on these two measures.

We present our main set of results in Tables 2 and ​ and3. 3 . Table 2 displays the results of models on our sample of nonunion public sector workers; Table 3 displays the results of models on our sample of nonunion private sector workers. For the models shown in the two tables, we specify standard log-linear OLS model of weekly wages. Random effects models simply reduce to the OLS since much of the between-state variation in log weekly wages is explained by between-state variation in the state-level covariates. As mentioned, models with state fixed-effects are inappropriate for this investigation given that nearly all the variation in public sector union strength is cross-state.

Effects of state unionization on log weekly wages for fulltime, nonunion workers in the public sector, 1977-2015

Notes: Robust standard errors clustered by state are in parentheses. All models also include year and occupation fixed-effects. Statistical significance (two-tailed tests) is indicated by:

Effects of state unionization on log weekly wages for fulltime, nonunion workers in the private sector, 1977-2015

The OLS models provide coefficient estimates of public sector union effects on nonunion wages. The next stage of our analysis involves translating these effects into dollar magnitudes. Generating predictions from standard log-linear models requires deciding on an appropriate smearing factor to retransform the dependent variable, and there is no consensus regarding what smearing factor is preferable ( Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 : 31). To generate predicted values in level form, we re-estimate GLM versions of the models from Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 specifying a log-link and gamma distribution family ( Kleykamp 2013 ; and Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 employ a similar strategy). This approach does not require transformation of the dependent variable in the first place. Based on these GLM models, we predict wages for nonunion workers if public sector unions were as weak as private sector ones. We provide a full set of results from these models in Tables A1 and ​ andA2 A2 of the Appendix ; significance levels and signs for the coefficients of key covariates are similar to the log-linear estimates.

The final stage of the analysis involves disaggregating spillover effects by occupation. Recall we hypothesize that among nonunion private sector workers, public sector spillovers should only be found among women, given their concentration in occupations with large public sector counterparts. Teasing out the public sector union effect for each of our 26 occupations allows us to test this hypothesis. We rerun our core models from Tables 2 and ​ and3, 3 , adding state public sector unionization x occupation interaction terms, and then estimate marginal effects of public sector unionization in each occupation. We present these effects in Figures 3 and ​ and4; 4 ; a full set of model results is available upon request.

Effect of public sector unionization by occupation among non union public sector workers

Notes: Figure shows the effect of public sector union strength on the weekly wages of nonunion men and women working in the public sector. Occupation-specific estimates of the relationship between public sector unionization and weekly wages are based on the models in Table 2 with the addition of occupation x public sector unionization interactions. Dots indicate the predicted percentage change in weekly wages given a 10 percentage point increase in public sector unionization, and lines represent 95% confidence intervals around those point estimates.

Effect of public sector unionization by occupation among nonunion private sector workers

Notes: Figure shows the effect of public sector union strength on the weekly wages of nonunion men and women working in the private sector. Occupation-specific estimates of the relationship between public sector unionization and weekly wages are based on the models in Table 3 with the addition of occupation by public sector unionization interactions. Dots indicate the predicted percentage change in weekly wages given a 10 percentage point increase in public sector unionization, and lines represent 95% confidence intervals around those point estimates.

Table 1 below displays descriptives for our key variables disaggregated by sector. Among both public and private sector nonunion workers, log weekly wages are higher for men than women. Average log weekly wages are higher among public than private sector workers, attributable to the higher education levels of public sector workers. The state-level measures, on the other hand, display little variation by sector given the high degree of aggregation to the state-level that cuts across occupations and industries. One exception is state-level public sector union density. An average private sector worker comes from a state where 36% of the public sector workforce is organized, compared to 29% and 30% public sector representation rates for public sector respondents. This likely reflects the fact that states with higher shares of its workers in the private sector also have higher public sector unionization rates and larger workforces in general. The individual-level covariates indicate the samples are disproportionately white and, among the private sector sample, evenly split between those with at least some college experience and those without. Over two-thirds of public sector workers, meanwhile, have at least some college experience. Average potential experience levels are likewise higher for public sector workers. Public sector respondents are more likely to be from the South than those in the private sector.

Descriptive statistics

Notes: Data come from CPS Survey from 1977 to 2015; we rely on the CPS-May files for 1977-1981, and the CPS-merged outgoing rotation group (ORG) files for 1983-2015. Means and proportions are weighted.

Figures 1 and ​ and2 2 provide a first approximation of the relationship between public sector union strength and nonunion wages. Figure 1 shows public sector unionization rates for each state in 1977 and 2015 alongside the corresponding median log wage for public and private sector nonunion male workers; Figure 2 presents the corresponding relationships between nonunion wages and public sector unionization rates for women. In general, public sector wages are higher than private sector wages, and a comparison across the figures reveals higher wages for nonunion men compared to women. Critically, both figures reveal upward slopes between state-level public sector union strength and nonunion weekly wages. Also evident from the pictures are the relatively similar public sector unionization rates in 1977 and 2015. Finally, the picture reveals the extraordinary variation in public sector unionization rates across states in both years, ranging from South Carolina, which today has a public sector unionization rate about as low as the national private sector rate, to states like New York and Connecticut, where two-thirds of government employees remain organized.

State public sector unionization and non union median log weekly wages, men

Notes: Authors’ calculations from CPS data. Median log wages are measured in constant 2015 dollars. Slopes refer to the β 1 coefficient from the regression equation Y j = β 0 + β 1 X j , where Y j is the median log weekly wages for state j and X j refers to the state-level public sector unionization rate; we estimated separate models by sector and year. Statistical significance of the slopes is indicated by: * p <.05, ** p <.01, *** p <.001.

State public sector unionization and non union median log weekly wages, women

Notes: Authors’ calculations from CPS data. Median log wages are measured in constant 2015 dollars. Slopes refer to the β 1 coefficient from the regression equation Y j = β 0 + β 0 + β 1 X j , where Y j is the median log weekly wages for state j and X j refers to the state-level public sector unionization rate; we estimated separate models by sector and year. Statistical significance of the slopes is indicated by: * p <.05, ** p <.01, *** p <.001.

Does the positive relationship between public sector unions and public sector nonunion wages remain after adjusting for our set of state- and individual-level correlates of pay? We present our model results in Table 2 below. State-level controls include public sector size, state GDP and GDP growth, state employment rates, the proportion of each state with at least a BA degree, the proportion of workers in manufacturing, and the proportion at risk of automation. These state-level measures help differentiate the relationship between government unionization and nonunion pay from other key explanations for wage trends in the public and private sectors. We also adjust for private sector union strength at the state-level to ensure that any public sector spillover effects are not simply proxying for the strength of private sector unions. All models also adjust for common individual-level correlates of wages, including race, sex, education, and hours worked per week. We estimate standard log-linear wage models with standard errors clustered by state, and include region identifiers.

The model results provide evidence of significant spillover effects among nonunion women and men in the public sector. Other state-level measures positively related to nonunion public sector pay include GDP, average education levels, and, for men, the risk of automation. 6 GDP growth is negatively associated with weekly wages in both models, consistent with related research that finds GDP growth is positively associated with working poverty at the state-level in models that also control for GDP levels, as ours do ( Brady, Baker, and Finnegan 2013 : Table 1). There are a few possible explanations for the finding. Wages may be a lagging indicator of an improving state economy, and indeed lagging the growth measure by five years results in a non-significant relationship. Also, in recent decades much of the benefits of economic growth have been captured by top-end earners, as reflected in research finding that state-level economic growth is positively related to inequality ( Frank 2009 ). Finally, our measure of GDP growth is dominated by capital income, and in the contemporary period the share of capital income has increased at the expense of labor income. 7 In both models, the private sector union effect is not significantly related to nonunion wages in the public sector. The individual controls operate as expected. Education, hours worked, and potential experience (although at a diminishing rate) are all positively associated with log weekly wages, while white respondents, on average, earn more than African-Americans and Hispanic public sector workers.

What does the positive association between nonunion public sector pay and public sector union strength translate to in terms of wage levels? To generate predicted wages in level form, we re-estimate GLM versions of the models from Tables 2 specifying a log-link and gamma distribution family. (We present the full results of these models in Table A1 of the Appendix ). From these models we predict wages for nonunion public sector workers if their state’s public sector unionization rates were as low as their private sector rates in 2015, the last year of our data. That is, our counterfactual indicates what wages for nonunion public sector workers would be if public sector union densities were as low as private sector densities are today. We first predict mean weekly wages based on Table 2 ’s model specification, allowing unionization to vary at the state-level as it does in the data. Second, we fix public sector unionization rates at their private sector levels in 2015, allowing all other controls to vary, and predict mean weekly wages under this counterfactual scenario. Subtracting the counterfactual wages from the predicted wages under the first scenario gives us our estimate of the size of the union effect ( Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2012 ; Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 follow a similar approach). Overall, we estimate that weekly wages for public sector nonunion women would be $57 lower if each state’s public sector unionization rate was as low as its private sector rate in 2015. That would translate to an annual wage loss of $2,964 for a fulltime, year-round employee. For public sector nonunion men, the counterfactual reveals that weekly wages would be $79 lower if their state’s public sector unionization rate were as low as the private sector rate.

The main effects estimates of Table 2 obscure substantial occupational variation in public sector union spillovers. Figure 3 below is based on a model that replicates the specification of Table 2 , but includes state-level public sector unionization x occupation interactions. (Full model results available upon request). This specification allows us to tease out the influence of a state’s public sector unionization rate for each of our 26 occupations. We show the average marginal effects on weekly wages of a 10-percentage point increase in the state-level public sector unionization rate for each occupation. Among nonunion public sector women, the size of the union influence varies, ranging from non-significant effects in such occupations as health, recreational, and child service workers, to substantial positive effects among cleaning and food service workers, and administrative support employees. How substantial? For nonunion, public sector transportation workers, the model estimates that if the state’s public sector unionization rate increased by 10 percentage points, average wages would increase by 5%. Similar effect sizes among women are found for mechanical workers and fire, police, and correctional employees. Interestingly, our models do not find significant spillover effects for teachers, consistent with recent related research ( Frandsen 2016 ). 8 Results are generally similar for nonunion men in the public sector, including the non-significant effect for nonunion teachers. The largest effects are found among fire, police, and correctional employees (also consistent with Frandsen 2016 ), mechanical, and transportation workers.

Next we turn to testing whether strong public sector unions exert positive wage spillovers to nonunion workers in the private sector. Table 3 below displays the results. The models provide evidence that public sector unionization is associated with higher nonunion private sector wages, but only for women. Among men, the public sector unionization coefficient is not significant. In both models, the private sector union effect is not significantly related to nonunion wages, indicating that the effects of private sector unions on nonunion pay previously established at the industry-region level ( Western and Rosenfeld 2011 ; Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016 ) do not extend to a state-level analysis, at least according to this specification. 9 Other state-level covariates that are significantly related to average nonunion private sector wages include our measures of a state’s economic health, and, in the model for men, the proportion of a state’s workers at risk of automation. GDP per capita and the proportion of the state with at least a BA are associated with higher average wages for nonunion private sector workers. Our measure of economic growth is negatively associated with nonunion pay, similar to Table 2 ‘s models. The individual-level controls again operate as expected.

Next we repeat the counterfactual exercise described above, except on our sample of nonunion private sector workers. Full results from this GLM model are presented in Table A2 of the Appendix . We only estimate the counterfactuals for women, given the lack of a significant relationship between nonunion private sector wages and public sector union densities for men (in both our log-linear and GLM-level specifications). Overall, we estimate that weekly wages for private sector nonunion women would be $31 lower if each state’s public sector unionization rate was as low as its private sector rate in 2015. That would translate to an annual wage loss of $1,612 for a fulltime, year-round employee.

As the final stage of our analyses, we estimate public sector unionization x occupation interaction models on our sample of nonunion private sector workers. We present the marginal effects for each occupation in Figure 4 below. As shown in the figure, among women the spillover effect is largest among financial sales, management-related, technical support, administrative support, and retail sales occupations. 10 Notable as well is the significant, positive spillover effect for nonunion, private sector teachers. For each of these groups of workers, a 10 point increase in their state’s public sector unionization rate is predicted to increase their weekly pay by approximately 2-3%. Recall from Table 3 that state-level public sector unionization is only significantly related to nonunion, private sector wages among women. The right-side of Figure 4 presents the predicted effects for men in our 26 occupations. The vast majority of the union effects cluster around 0, with the exceptions of financial sales and management-related occupations.

Among nonunion private sector workers, teachers, administrative support, retail sales, and management-related occupations are dominated by women, while the gender balance is more evenly split in financial sales. Men disproportionately comprise technical support occupations. Somewhat surprisingly then, it is not the case that public sector union spillovers to the private sector are restricted solely to female-dominated occupations. In a few gender-balanced or male-dominated occupations, women (and men in financial sales and management-related positions) benefit from a strong public sector union presence.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Using data from 1977 to 2015 on millions of public and private sector employees, our analyses reveal sizable spillover effects from public sector unions to unorganized workers. Our first set of analyses finds significant spillovers for unorganized men and women in the public sector. We estimate that average weekly wages would be $57 (for women) and $79 (for men) lower if public sector unions had suffered the same fate as private sector ones. Our second set of analyses represents the first tests of public sector spillover effects to private sector workers. We find evidence that the boundaries of “protected” segments of the labor market extend into less protected realms: a strong public sector union presence is associated with higher pay for nonunion, private sector women. Counterfactuals reveal that nonunion private sector women would earn, on average, $31 less per week if public sector memberships were at their current private sector rate. Nonunion women in such occupations as teaching, financial sales, and management related occupations benefit the most from a strong public sector union presence in their state. 11

As with any investigation of such scope, shortcomings remain. Future research, especially of the historical and qualitative variety, should seek to distinguish analytically the various channels through which unions help raise nonunion pay. Large-scale employee-based datasets like the CPS do not allow us to differentiate economic from norm-based mechanisms, especially given the lack of employer information in the surveys. In supplemental analyses (available upon request) we did model various political covariates to see whether they moderated the relationship between public sector union strength and nonunion pay. These variables included a measure of the state’s NOMINATE score for each year, obtained from Berry et al. (2010) , and an annual 5-category measure of the partisan balance of the state legislature, obtained from Jordan and Grossman (2016) .

The NOMINATE variable captures the conservative or liberal ideological leaning of each state’s legislature, while the partisan balance variable indicates which party controls one or both chambers (for bicameral state legislatures) of the legislature. Neither measure is available for all years of our analyses, and in truncated versions of our state-level models neither one is significantly related to nonunion public or private sector wages. 12 Nor does their inclusion alter the relationships between public sector union strength and pay. We do not view these results as dispositive proof that unions’ influence on nonunion pay does not operate through political channels - research that concentrates on other levels of analysis, including unions’ roles in local politics, is needed (see Moe 2006 for one example). What these supplemental results do indicate to us is that economic and normative channels are likely the largest drivers of our findings in both sets of analyses.

Future analyses that are able to distinguish between the various spillover channels can also answer a question emerging from our analyses of public sector union effects on nonunion private sector workers. As hypothesized, these effects are significant for women but not for men ( Table 3 ). This stems, in part, from the greater fraction of women in large public sector occupations such as administrative support and teaching that have sizable private sector corollaries ( Figure 4 ). What remains unresolved is why, in certain occupations such as teaching, unorganized private sector men do not seem to benefit from public sector union strength but women do. After all, while women dominant the teaching ranks, there are plenty of men teaching at public and private schools.

Another limitation lies in the CPS’s union membership question. Beginning in 1977, the CPS added the phrase “employee association,” to its question and likely thereafter picks up some workers who belong to professional employee organizations that are related to, but distinct from, traditional labor unions ( Hirsch and Macpherson 2003 : 351). Another important next step for researchers would be to move beyond the CPS (as well as any other currently publicly available datasets) when analyzing public sector union effects in order to differentiate labor union spillover effects from the effects of other types of professional organizations.

Any investigation into public sector unions must confront the analytical limitation presented by a lack of over-time variation in organization rates ( Anzia and Moe 2015 : 121). What this means for our investigation is that we can only capitalize on inter-state variation in public sector unionism. Our models adjust for the effects of dominant rival explanations for wage trends, but there may be unobserved state characteristics that correlate with public sector union strength and nonunion pay. Here recent developments in states like Wisconsin – while disastrous from the perspective of public sector unions – offer researchers an opportunity to home in on intra-state, cross-time changes in public sector union strength. A supplemental test of wage patterns among private sector nonunion workers in Wisconsin and neighboring Minnesota reveal diverging trends. We estimate a comparative interrupted time series model that compares wage trends for private sector nonunion women in the two states before and after Wisconsin’s passage of Act 10 in 2011, which limited collective bargaining for most public employees. (A fUll set of results is available upon request). Average wages in both states held fairly flat through 2010; both states saw their wages decline in 2011, but while wages in Minnesota rebound through 2015, wages in Wisconsin have remained flat. But more time needs to elapse and more states need to undergo substantial shifts in public sector union memberships before a comprehensive test that focuses on both inter- and intra-state change is possible.

Finally, the pay benefits for nonunion workers of a strong public sector union presence should be weighed against any negative impact public sector unions have on employment levels. A higher tax burden precipitated by government unions’ generous contracts may lower private sector employers’ incentives to expand, hurting employment rates in states with strong public sector unions. Our samples are necessarily constrained to respondents non-missing on sector and occupation. As a result, of those not currently working, we capture only those who do report a sector and occupation (likely from their prior job). Still, in supplemental tests (available upon request) we ran a series of logistic models of employment for private sector nonunion workers. We find no significant association between public sector union strength and the likelihood of employment for private sector nonunion women. Among men, however, the relationship is significant, and negative, although the effects are substantively small. Future research utilizing a broader employment measure should further investigate this potential wage-employment tradeoff.

Limitations aside, our results broaden our understanding of organized labor’s reach in supporting the paychecks of nonunion Americans by revealing the robust relationship between public sector union power and nonunion pay for men and women in the public sector and women in the private sector. Ongoing attacks on public sector unions threaten to remove this buttress. Speaking of the concerted efforts to cripple public sector unions in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession, Freeman and Han write that “The ‘war on public sector collective bargaining’ was the most widespread and substantive attack on collective bargaining in the US since the 1930s’ battles in the private sector” (2012: 387). Six years on, the war continues with no end in sight. At the federal level, the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME has made the entire public sector “right-to-work,” allowing government employees covered by union contracts to opt out of paying union dues ( Liptak 2017 ). At the state level, in Texas the governor demanded – and the Senate passed – a bill banning automatic dues deduction from most public sector union members ( Pollock 2017 ). And at the municipal level, the reduction in funding from state capitals to heavily-unionized cities like Chicago has pit unions representing government workers against cash-strapped mayors, often leading to union concessions and employment cuts ( Miller 2017 ).

The consequences of losing this war are usually depicted as limited to the economic standing of public sector unions and their members, or, less frequently, to the health of the Democratic Party. What our analyses demonstrate is that the impact would reach wider. While public sector union memberships are high relative to rates in the private sector, compared to our peer nations, they are actually quite low. In Canada, for example, over two-thirds of the public sector is organized. 13 In the U.S., two-thirds are not. What our investigation makes clear is that these unorganized workers benefit from a strong public sector union presence. As this presence declines, so too should the economic standing of the millions of government employees who do not belong to a labor union.

Meanwhile, the unorganized private sector is the largest segment of the contemporary workforce. Nonunion, private sector women’s wages have grown substantially from the late-1970s onward, helping to cushion the impact of flat wages for those households with a male and female wage earner. While this growth has various causes, the second part of our empirical analyses suggests steady public sector union strength helped support the economic standing of nonunion women in the private sector. If Governor Scott Walker’s successful attacks on public sector workers in Wisconsin are a harbinger of a broader retreat for public sector unions, this support will collapse, and, perhaps along with it, the upward trend in pay for nonunion women.

DATA APPENDIX

Below we list all covariates and values used in the models. We exclude upper-level managers and executives, the self-employed, and respondents missing on occupation from our samples. Samples limited to respondents aged 16 to 64.

State public sector unionization : a weighted proportion of public sector workers in each state and year who belong to a union.

State private sector unionization : a weighted proportion of private sector workers in each state and year who belong to a union.

State lagged employment rate : a weighted proportion of individuals who are employed; measured by state and year, and lagged by one year.

State GDP : the total of 3 components (gross operating surplus, taxes on production and imports, and subsidies) of each state’s Gross Domestic Product per capita (Bureau of Economic Analysis), measured in $10,000 and in constant 2015 dollars.

State GDP growth : the year-to-year change in each state’s GDP.

State proportion with at least a BA : a weighted proportion of individuals in each state and year who have completed at least 4 years of college.

State proportion in manufacturing : a weighted proportion of workers in each state and year who work in the manufacturing sector (the manufacturing of durables, nondurables, and transportation equipment).

State risk of automation : an index increasing from 0 to 10 as the task content of an occupation rises ( Autor and Dorn 2013 ); we aggregate this index up to a weighted average by state and year.

Race/ethnicity effects (5): white (ref.), African-American, Hispanic, other, missing.

Potential experience

Potential experience 2

Education effects (4): less than high school (ref.), high school or equivalent completion, some college (but less than 4 years), at least 4 years of college.

Weekly hours worked

Metro effects (3): resides in a metropolitan area (ref.), resides outside a metropolitan area, missing.

Region effects (4): northeast (ref.), north central, south, west.

Occupation fixed-effects : (1) management-related; (2) professional specialty; (3) technicians and related support; (4) financial sales and related; (5) retail sales; (6) administrative support; (7) firefighting, police, and correctional institutions; (8) farm operators and managers; (9) other agricultural and related; (10) mechanics and repairers; (11) construction trades; (12) extractive; (13) precision production; (14) machine operators, assemblers, and inspectors; (15) transportation and material moving; (16) housekeeping and cleaning; (17) protective service (security guards, crossing guards, etc.); (18) food preparation and service; (19) health care support; (20) building and grounds cleaning and maintenance; (21) personal appearance; (22) recreation and hospitality; (23) child care workers; (24) miscellaneous personal care and service; (25) nurses; and (26) teachers. These occupation codes are based on a system developed by Autor and Dorn (2013 ; see also Dorn 2009 ) that reconciles changes made to the Census occupation classification scheme over time.

Year effects (37): 1977 (ref.) through 2015.

Effects of state unionization on weekly wages for fulltime, nonunion workers in the public sector, GLM models, 1977-2015

Notes: Results provide GLM estimates of models in Table 2 . Robust standard errors clustered by state are in parentheses. All models also include year and occupation fixed-effects. Statistical significance (two-tailed tests) is indicated by:

Effects of state unionization on weekly wages for fulltime, nonunion workers in the private sector, GLM models, 1977-2015

Notes: Results provide GLM estimates of models in Table 3 . Robust standard errors clustered by state are in parentheses. All models also include year and occupation fixed-effects. Statistical significance (two-tailed tests) is indicated by:

1 See http://www.nea.org/home/58968.htm .

2 Fifty states plus the District of Columbia multiplied by 26 occupations is equal to 1,326.

3 The CPS does not ask about workforce experience, so we define potential experience as age minus years of education minus 4, approximating the potential time spent out of school. While it is more standard to define potential experience as age minus education minus 6, doing so results in a significant number of negative values given the minimum age of 16 for our sample. Using the standard measure and converting negative values to zeroes produces similar results.

4 We explored two additional ways of operationalizing the risk for automation, and obtained substantively similar results across specifications. First, to address the concern that some occupations have high values on more than one type of task, we created a measure of routine task intensity by subtracting the natural log of both manual task content and abstract task content from the natural log of routine task content. Second, we calculated a measure of routine employment share, defined as the proportion of workers in a given state who work in an occupation in the top third of routine task intensity. See Autor and Dorn (2013 : 1570-1573) for additional details on the construction of these measures.

5 We also omit a right-to-work (RTW) indicator from our main analyses. In supplemental tests that include a RTW dummy and a RTW x public sector union strength interaction term we find that the presence or absence of RTW legislation in a given year is not significantly related to the wages of nonunion public and private sector workers, nor does controlling for RTW legislation affect the relationship between public sector unionization and workers’ wages.

6 In supplemental tests (available upon request) we relaxed the assumption that the effects of the state-level covariates are stable over time by including year interaction terms. We interacted each state-level covariate with either a linear or a dummy specification of year. In these models the public sector union effects remain similar to those shown in Tables 2 and ​ and3. 3 . Additionally, models with public sector unionization x year interactions indicate that the public sector union effect is relatively stable over time, with a slight increase in the early 1980s.

7 See https://www.cbo.gov/publication/42537 for more.

8 No estimate was obtained for public sector women miners, since there is only 1 in our sample.

9 In models with state fixed-effects, the private sector unionization coefficients are positive and significant for men.

10 While the largest point estimate is fire, police, and correctional workers, the 95% confidence interval crosses zero due to small sample sizes for that particular private sector occupation.

11 An examination of detailed occupations within the categories of management-related reveals that a sizable fraction are analysts of various sorts, including auditors and accountants. Among financial sales, the majority of nonunion private sector women are retail sales supervisors.

12 Given the correlation between these measures, we entered them individually as well as together. In no case was either one significantly related to worker pay.

13 See http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2015005-eng.htm .

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Contributor Information

Jake Rosenfeld, Washington University-St. Louis.

Patrick Denice, University of Western Ontario.

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Automated mobility in Europe: where are we now?

Automation in road transport is at the forefront of the European Commission's agenda, aligning with key policy objectives such as the greening and digitalisation of the transport sector. Cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM) plays a central role in this transition, promising safer and more inclusive road transportation, while enhancing the competitiveness of European industries. The European Commission, through Horizon Europe, invests EUR 500 million in a public-private partnership on CCAM, which has been topped up by the private members by the same amount. Since 2021, EUR 159 million have been invested in research and innovation (R&I) activities to support 19 European projects to deliver on CCAM.

The mobility landscape is experiencing a surge in clean, connected, cooperative, and automated vehicles, driven by the pressing need to improve road safety and curb greenhouse gas emissions. This trend is characterised by the growing adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles for their environmental benefits, alongside advancements in connectivity that bolster safety and efficiency through real-time data exchange between vehicles and surrounding infrastructure. With the rapid evolution of automation and self-driving technologies that prioritise safety, accessibility, and reliability, the future of mobility is steering toward cleaner, more sustainable, user-centric, and smarter transportation solutions.

While the European automotive sector commands a significant share of R&D investment and employment, challenges stemming from electrification and digitalisation are also pushing the EU to maintain its leadership position amidst global competition. Today, we are seeing a progressive introduction of CCAM solutions, such as automated functions in passenger cars, shuttles, logistics operations, and last-mile delivery services, commercially available in Europe. Together with clean technologies, these solutions integrate existing transport ecosystems and are complemented by investments in smart mobility infrastructure, fostering growth in new business models. The development of CCAM is thus providing crucial opportunities to support the evolution of the automotive industry, and beyond.

In the 2016 Amsterdam Declaration, Member States urged the Commission to support the transition towards automation in road transportation with a comprehensive strategy at the EU level. Responding to this call, the Commission published in 2018 the Communication "On the road to automated mobility: An EU strategy for mobility of the future" . It outlined a set of objectives to position Europe as a global leader in CCAM across transport modes in subsequent years. The main recommendation of the Communication revolved around the need to coordinate EU instruments at research and regulatory level, alongside private sector engagements and funding programmes within Member States, to accelerate the transformation towards a safer, more resilient, and efficient transport sector capable of meeting diverse population needs.

Since 2018, numerous EU initiatives have been implemented. This Staff Working Document (SWD) highlights 10 achievements that are bringing Europe closer to deploying CCAM. While the publication emphasises a strong R&I footprint, the scope of these 10 achievements is broad, covering regulatory, financing, and policy actions, technical standards, infrastructure adaptation, as well as data and connectivity initiatives.

 This SWD presents a unified European vision that enables a progressive and seamless transition to CCAM, from research to widespread deployment, towards a multimodal, shared, sustainable, inclusive, affordable and safe transport sector. Several R&I success stories are highlighted throughout, demonstrating the impact of EU investment in CCAM, with a total of EUR 1 billion allocated for the duration of Horizon Europe.

More information

Staff Working Document on CCAM in Europe

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Report | Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (PREE)

Latest data release on unionization is a wake-up call to lawmakers : We must fix our broken system of labor law

Report • By Heidi Shierholz , Margaret Poydock , John Schmitt , and Celine McNicholas • January 20, 2022

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One of the most important things that could be done to generate a more equitable economy is to dismantle the barriers to union organizing and collective bargaining (McNicholas et al. 2019; Oliver 2021). New data on unionization from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2022), coupled with evidence on the value of unions and on workers’ desire to be unionized, reinforce the importance of this goal and the urgent need for policy reforms:

• In 2021, 15.8 million workers in the United States were represented by a union —a decline of 581,000 from 2019 and well under half what it would be had the share of workers represented by a union (11.6%) not fallen to well under half of what it was roughly 40 years ago.
• In 2021, after shooting up to 12.1% in 2020 because of pandemic-related employment shifts, the unionization rate dropped back down its 2019 level of 11.6% (down 0.5 percentage points from 2020 to 2021). 
• Unionization rates jumped up in 2020 in large part because of a “pandemic composition effect,” and fell back in 2021 as that effect began to unwind. The jobs that were lost in 2020 were more concentrated in industries with low unionization rates, such as leisure and hospitality, which raised the overall unionization rate. In 2021 these types of less-unionized jobs came back and offset the 2020 increase unionization rates. As the economy continues to recover and the pandemic composition effect continues to unwind, that will put downward pressure on unionization rates in 2022. 
• Since 2019, union levels have dropped in both the private sector (down 507,000) and, to a lesser extent, in the public sector (down 74,000). In the private sector, the unionization rate in 2021 was 7.0%, down 0.1 percentage points from 2019. The public sector unionization rate was 37.6% in 2021, up 0.4 percentage points from 2019. 
• In 2021, men had a unionization rate of 11.9%, compared with 11.3% for women. The gender gap in unionization has narrowed somewhat during the pandemic, though both men and women saw declines in the number of unionized workers between 2019 and 2021—a loss of 429,000 for men and a loss of 152,000 for women. 
• Of all major racial and ethnic groups, Black workers continued to have the highest unionization rates in 2021 , at 12.9%. This compares with 11.6% for white workers, 10.3% for Latinx workers, and 9.0% for Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers. 
• The substantial level of union activity in 2021 (including organizing drives and strikes), along with polling data showing the large share of workers who would like a union at their workplace, demonstrate that workers want and value unions. The fact that unionization nevertheless dropped in 2021 is a glaring testament to how broken U.S. labor law really is and how urgent it is that Congress pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.

Union membership vs. union representation

If a workplace is unionized, all workers in the bargaining unit get the benefits of being represented by the union, even if they are not union members. Thus the share of workers represented by a union is somewhat higher than the share of workers who are members of a union. In 2021, the share of workers represented by a union was 11.6%, while the share of workers who were union members was 10.3%. Because all workers in a bargaining unit get the benefit of being represented by the union, union representation is the more relevant statistic when considering the impact of unionization on labor market outcomes. Therefore, we focus on union representation, rather than union membership, in our analyses. In this report, the terms “unionization rate” and “union coverage rate” are shorthand for the union representation rate. Because the government data on unionization exclude self-employed workers, the term workforce in this report refers to wage and salary workers. 

Workers essentially have two sources of potential power vis-à-vis their employers: a union or the implicit threat that they can quit and take another job. During the last year, employers have been forced to compete for workers in a way that has not happened since the end of the 1990s. Workers gained leverage because the American Rescue Plan Act has generated a strong recovery from the COVID-19 downturn with substantial demand for workers at the same time that millions of workers are out of the labor force due to health and safety concerns or pandemic-related care responsibilities. As a result of this increased leverage, workers have seen strong wage growth and have been able to quit jobs in record numbers and take jobs that are better for them. When the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, however, these unusual labor market dynamics are likely to disappear. To sustain the increased worker power of the last year, it is crucial that workers are able to join unions. But as the 2021 unionization numbers underscore, only an overhaul of current labor law will make it possible for most workers who want to join a union to be able to do so. The Biden administration and Congress must institute policies—such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act—that promote the right to union representation and collective bargaining as we rebuild our economy.

To understand what happened to unionization in 2021, it is crucial to recall what happened in 2020 (BLS 2021c). In 2020, the number of union workers declined substantially as the pandemic caused massive job loss for both union and nonunion workers. However, unionization rates —the share of the workforce that is unionized—increased substantially because union workers lost fewer jobs during the first year of the pandemic than nonunion workers did. The lower job loss among the unionized workforce was due in no small part to a “pandemic composition” effect—the fact that the industries that got hit hardest by the pandemic (such as leisure and hospitality) are less likely to be unionized than industries that were more sheltered from the pandemic, and this change in the composition of the workforce raised unionization rates mechanically. Put another way, jobs in less unionized industries were lost at a higher rate, so unionization rates went up.

In 2021, that dynamic happened in reverse as jobs were added in the recovery. The “trampoline” effect—the fact that the jobs that come back in a recovery tend to look pretty much like the jobs that were lost—means that the jobs that came back in 2021 were concentrated in industries (such as leisure and hospitality) that have low unionization rates. This contributed to the substantial decline in the unionization rate in 2021, undoing the 2020 increase (BLS 2021c, 2022).

In particular, the share of workers who were represented by a union fell by 0.5 percentage points between 2020 and 2021, from 12.1% to 11.6%. But between 2019 and 2021—the full pandemic period so far—unionization rates were unchanged, at 11.6%. As explained above, unionization rates rose sharply in 2020, from 11.6% to 12.1%, in large part because of a pandemic composition effect, which began to unwind in 2021 as jobs came back, and unionization rates reverted to where they were in 2019. However, as the economy continues to recover and the pandemic composition effect continues to unwind, that will put downward pressure on unionization rates in 2022. 

The number of workers in unions dropped in 2021 by 137,000, on top of a drop of 444,000 in 2020, for a total decline of 581,000 between 2019 and 2021. The fact that the unionization rate held steady between 2019 and 2021 even though the number of workers in unions dropped substantially is explained by the fact that the number of union workers and the number of nonunion workers declined at similar rates over this two-year period (-3.5% for union workers and -3.8% for nonunion workers).

The overall unionization numbers mask key differences between the public sector and the private sector. In the private sector, the unionization rate in 2021 was 7.0%. That is down 0.1 percentage points from 2019 (it rose 0.1 percentage points in 2020 and dropped 0.2 percentage points in 2021). The number of private-sector workers who were represented by a union dropped by 507,000 between 2019 and 2021 (down 544,000 in 2020 and holding roughly steady with an addition of 37,000 workers in 2021). The largest total declines in the number of unionized private-sector workers over this two-year period were in manufacturing, with a loss of 220,000 (134,000 in 2020 and 86,000 in 2021), and in leisure and hospitality, with a loss of 153,000 (a decline of 177,000 in 2020 and an increase of 24,000 in 2021).

In the public sector, the unionization rate in 2021, at 37.6%, was more than five times that of the private sector. The public-sector unionization rate in 2021 was up 0.4 percentage points from 2019—rising 1.2 percentage points in 2020 and dropping 0.8 percentage points in 2021. Jobs are not yet coming back in the public sector (virtually all the job gains in 2021 were in the private sector; public sector employment was virtually flat in 2021), so any pandemic composition effects occurring within the public sector are likely still in play. The number of unionized public-sector workers dropped 74,000 between 2019 and 2021 (it rose 100,000 in 2020 and dropped 174,000 in 2021). Two-thirds of the drop in the number of unionized public-sector workers between 2019 and 2021 was at the federal level (50,000), and one-third was at the state and local level (23,000).

Of all major racial and ethnic groups, Black workers continued to have the highest unionization rates in 2021, at 12.9%. 1 This compares with 11.6% for white workers, 10.3% for Latinx workers, and 9.0% for Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers. As explained below, unions have historically helped, and continue to help, close wage gaps for Black and Latinx workers.

The gender gap in unionization has narrowed somewhat during the pandemic, with the unionization rate for men dropping by 0.2 percentage points (from 12.1% to 11.9%) and the unionization rate for women increasing by 0.3 percentage points (from 11.0% to 11.3%) between 2019 and 2021. This reflects that women are more concentrated in the public sector, which, as discussed above, has seen an increase in its unionization rate since 2019, whereas men are more concentrated in industries that have seen a meaningful decline in unionization rates, such as manufacturing. However, both men and women saw declines in the number of unionized workers between 2019 and 2021—a loss of 429,000 for men and 152,000 for women.

The states with the largest shares of workers represented by unions in 2021 are New York (24.1%), Hawaii (24.1%), Washington (20.0%), Oregon (18.8%), and New Jersey (17.9%), whereas the states with the smallest shares of workers represented by unions are South Carolina (2.0%), North Carolina (3.4%), Arkansas (4.4%), Texas (4.7%), and South Dakota (5.0%). The largest increases in the number of workers represented by unions between 2019 and 2021 were in Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia, Georgia, and California , whereas the biggest losses were in Florida, Texas, Colorado, Missouri, and Alabama.

A large and growing majority of workers want union representation

The share of workers who do not but would like to have a union at their workplace is far higher than the share who had union representation in 2021 (11.6%). While more recent data are unavailable, an analysis of 2017 survey data showed almost half of nonunion workers polled (48%) said they would vote to create a union in their workplace tomorrow if they could. That figure is up substantially from about one-third (32–33%) of nonunion, nonmanagerial workers asked similar questions in 1977 and 1995 (Kochan et al. 2018; EPI 2021).

Note that the share of workers expressing a desire for unionization has increased as the share of workers represented by a union has declined. Today’s 11.6% unionization rate is well under half of what it was roughly 40 years ago (Mishel, Rhinehart, and Windham 2020). Despite the decline in union representation and the growing gap between the demand for and the availability of union representation, workers continued to exercise their right to form unions and bargain collectively in 2021. Union activity last year included organizing drives with nurses (Jamieson 2021), journalists (Fu 2021), graduate students (Meyerson 2021), and even Starbucks workers (Molla 2021), as well as successful strikes by taxi drivers in New York (Rosenthal 2021), health care workers in Buffalo (Hetherly 2021), and factory workers at John Deere (Jett 2021). Even the threat to strike, most notably by the members International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union and University of California faculty in the fall of 2021, demonstrated the critical leverage that collective action provides to workers when negotiating better pay and working conditions (Steier 2021; Maddaus 2021; City News Service 2021).

Why do workers want unions?

When workers are able to come together, form a union, and collectively bargain, their wages, benefits, and working conditions improve.

Unions provide workers with higher wages. For example, a worker covered by a union contract earns 10.2% more in wages on average than a peer with similar education, occupation, and experience in a nonunionized workplace in the same sector (Banerjee et al. 2021).

Further, unions help to reduce gender and racial/ethnic wage gaps in part by increasing wages for women and for Black and Hispanic workers. Hourly wages for women represented by a union are 4.7% higher on average than for nonunionized women with comparable characteristics. Black workers represented by a union are paid 13.1% more than their nonunionized Black peers, and Hispanic workers represented by a union are paid 18.8% more than their nonunionized Hispanic peers (Banerjee et al. 2021). Research by Farber et al. (2021) confirms that unions have historically helped, and continue to help, close wage gaps for Black and Hispanic workers.

Unions also provide workers with better benefits. For example, union workers are far more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance: More than nine in 10 workers covered by a union contract (95%) have access to employer-sponsored health benefits, compared with just 69% of nonunion workers (BLS 2021a). Further, union employers contribute more to their employee’s health care benefits. Union workers also have greater access to paid sick days: More than nine in 10 workers—92%—covered by a union contract have access to paid sick days, compared with 77% of nonunion workers (BLS 2021b).

Unions also improve the health and safety of workplaces by providing health insurance and paid sick time, requiring safety equipment, and empowering workers to report unsafe conditions without fear of retaliation (Zoorob 2018; Amick et al. 2015). So-called right-to-work laws—which weaken unions by allowing workers to receive union benefits without paying their share of union representation costs—has been associated with a roughly 14% increase in the rate of occupational fatalities (Zoorob 2018).

The benefits of unionization go beyond the workplace. When local economies have greater shares of union workers, nonunion workers benefit, because unions effectively set broader standards—including higher wages—which nonunion employers must meet to attract and retain the workers they need (Rosenfeld, Denice, and Laird 2016; Mishel 2021). Further, high unionization rates are consistently associated with a much broader set of positive spillover effects across multiple dimensions. These positive outcomes include higher state and local minimum wages, better health benefits, easier access to unemployment insurance, access to paid sick leave, access to paid family and medical leave, and unrestricted voting opportunities (Banerjee et al. 2021). 

Obstacles to unionization

A key contributor to the decline of unions is fierce corporate opposition to union organizing. It is now standard, when workers seek to organize, for employers to hire union avoidance consultants to coordinate intense anti-union campaigns. A recent EPI analysis concluded that private-sector employers spend nearly $340 million per year hiring union avoidance advisers to help them prevent employees from organizing (McNicholas et al. 2019). And though the National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal for private-sector employers to intimidate, coerce, or fire workers in retaliation for participating in union-organizing campaigns, the penalties are grossly insufficient to provide a meaningful disincentive for such behavior (Oliver 2021). The persistence of illegal retaliation is evident in a review of federal records: Employers are charged with violating federal law in 41.5% of all union election campaigns and one out of five union election campaigns involve a charge that a worker was illegally fired for union activity (McNicholas et al. 2019). And these data do not include the veiled threats and other legal ways that employers can thwart unionizing efforts, thanks to weak labor laws (Lafer and Loustaunau 2020).

What can policymakers do to protect workers’ rights?

Despite the attacks on union organizing, policymakers have neglected to update labor law to ensure that workers have a meaningful right union representation in their workplace—and the consequences are clear in the data. Union membership dropped in 2021 despite a substantial amount of union activity, and that drop is part of a decades long decline in unionization—a decline that is occurring not because workers don’t want unions, but because our current system of labor law is broken. 

As we emerge from the pandemic, we must adopt policies that make it easier for workers to form a union. The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the House last year with bipartisan support, provides a comprehensive set of reforms that would strengthen private-sector workers’ right to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. The Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, introduced last fall, guarantees public-sector workers the right to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. There is also room for improvement at the state level. Currently, more than half of U.S. states lack comprehensive collective bargaining laws for state and local public-sector workers, and millions of agricultural and domestic workers are excluded from collective bargaining laws unless states pass legislation to cover them (McNicholas et al. 2020). These policy changes at the federal and state level are not only crucial to restoring a fair balance of power between workers and employers, but also essential to an equitable recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

The dynamic we’ve seen over the last year—of employers needing to compete for workers leading to wage increases and enabling workers to quit their jobs and find better ones—is the result of the extraordinary labor market dynamics of the pandemic. These dynamics are unlikely to last once the pandemic is behind us. For lasting strong wage growth and decent working conditions, working people must be able to join unions. The 2021 union numbers are a wake-up call. If policymakers fail to act, the downward trends in unionization will likely continue and the post-pandemic economy will be marked by widespread inequality and a lack of worker power. The Biden administration and Congress must institute policies—such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and other legislation to boost unionization—that promote the right to union representation and collective bargaining as we rebuild our economy.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Daniel Perez for research assistance to prepare this report.

1. See McNicholas, Shierholz, and Poydock 2021 for a discussion of this trend.

Amick, Benjamin C., III, Sheilah Hogg-Johnson, Desiree Latour-Villamil, and Ron Saunders. 2015. “ Protecting Construction Worker Health and Safety in Ontario, Canada: Identifying a Union Safety Effect .”  Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine  57, no. 12: 1337–1342,  https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000000562 .

Banerjee, Asha, Margaret Poydock, Celine McNicholas, Ihna Mangundayao, and Ali Sait. 2021. Unions Are Not Only Good for Workers, They’re Good for Communities and for Democracy . Economic Policy Institute, December 2021.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2021a. “ Table 2. Medical Care Benefits: Access, Participation, and Take-Up Rates, March 2021 ,” Employee Benefits in the United States . Last modified September 23, 2021.

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Farber, Henry S., Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu. 2021. “ Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data .” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 3 (August): 1325–1385, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab012 .

Fu, Angela. 2021. “ Not Just a Wave, But a Movement: Journalists Unionize At Record Numbers .” Poynter , July 16, 2021.

Hetherly, Marian. 2021. “ CWA Workers Approve New Union Contracts with Catholic Health, Return to Mercy Hospital Wednesday .” WBFO-NPR , November 9, 2021.

Jamieson, Dave. 2021. “ 2,000 Maine Nurses Form Union in Major Election Win .” Huffpost , April 30, 2021.

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Kochan, Thomas A., Duanyi Yang, William T. Kimball, and Erin L. Kelly. 2018. “ Worker Voice in America: Is There a Gap Between What Workers Expect and What They Experience? ”  ILR Review  72, no. 1 (January): 3–38, https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793918806250 .

Lafer, Gordon, and Lola Loustaunau. 2020. Fear at Work: An Inside Account of How Employers Threaten, Intimidate, and Harass Workers to Stop Them from Exercising Their Right to Collective Bargaining . Economic Policy Institute, July 2020.

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McNicholas, Celine, Margaret Poydock, Julia Wolfe, Ben Zipperer, Gordon Lafer, and Lola Loustaunau. 2019.  Unlawful: U.S. Employers Are Charged with Violating Federal Law in 41.5% of All Union Election Campaigns . Economic Policy Institute, December 2019.

McNicholas, Celine, Lynn Rhinehart, Margaret Poydock, Heidi Shierholz, and Daniel Perez. 2020. Why Unions Are Good for Workers—Especially in a Crisis Like COVID-19: 12 Policies That Would Boost Worker Rights, Safety, and Wages . Economic Policy Institute, August 2020.

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Scripps Research reports progress toward creating vaccine against the harmful ‘zombie’ drug xylazine

An experimental vaccine blocked the toxic effects of the drug — which is frequently added to heroin and illicit fentanyl — in experiments conducted on rodents, according to research published this month

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Scripps Research in La Jolla says it has taken a promising step toward developing a vaccine to fight the effects of xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that’s illicitly added to fentanyl and heroin, triggering a rise in overdose deaths.

The institute’s experimental vaccine blocked xylazine’s toxic effect in experiments conducted on rodents, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Chemical Communications. It works by stimulating the immune system to create antibodies that reduce the level of xylazine in the blood stream, the institute said.

Veterinarians regularly use xylazine to sedate or calm everything from sheep and cattle to cats and dogs before surgery or while conducting diagnostic tests. It’s been approved for that purpose by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But it is not approved for use in humans because it can slow breathing and heart rates and produce dangerously low blood-pressure levels.

Scientists say xylazine, a non-opioid sedative, also can cause skin lesions and wounds that don’t heal and sometimes lead to the need to amputate parts of legs or arms.

Xyaline is often illicitly added to fentanyl and other drugs to lengthen the feeling of euphoria they can give, scientists say. It has taken on the nickname “zombie drug.”

“There is currently no remedy for xylazine poisoning other than supportive care, thus, we believe our research efforts and the data we have provided will pave the way for an effective treatment in humans,” Kim D. Janda, the Scripps chemist who is leading the research, said in a statement.

The precise number of human deaths caused by the addition of xylazine to fentanyl and other drugs is not known. But the Journal of the American Medical Association reported in January that at least 43 states reported deaths related to xylazine, which also is known as “tranq dope.”

Scripps Research is deeply involved in vaccine research and made significant contributions to the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and by Pfizer and BioNTech.

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Most Americans view unions favorably, though few workers belong to one

Most Americans like labor unions, at least in the abstract. A majority (55%) holds a favorable view of unions, versus 33% who hold an unfavorable view, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. For most of the past three decades that the Center has asked that question, in fact, Americans have viewed unions at least somewhat more favorably than unfavorably.

Despite those fairly benign views, unionization rates in the United States have dwindled in recent decades (even though, in the past few years, the absolute number of union members has grown slightly). As of 2017, just 10.7% of all wage and salary workers were union members, matching the record low set in 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Back in 1983, when the BLS data series begins, about a fifth (20.1%) of wage and salary workers belonged to a union. (Unionization peaked in 1954 at 34.8% of all U.S. wage and salary workers, according to separate data from the Congressional Research Service .)

The long-term decline of organized labor has affected most parts of the U.S. economy, but not uniformly. In general, the biggest declines in unionization have come in those occupations and industries that were – and to a large extent still are – the foundations of the American labor movement , according to our analysis of BLS data going back to 2000.

Among the 22 broad occupational categories into which the BLS sorts U.S. wage and salary workers, the biggest decline in union membership from 2000 to 2017 was in transportation and material moving occupations , a broad grouping that includes everything from airline pilots and long-haul truckers to taxi drivers, train conductors and parking-lot attendants. In 2000, nearly 1.8 million of the 8.1 million workers in those occupations, or 21.7%, were union members. By last year, only 1.3 million transportation and material moving workers (14.8%) were unionized, even though total employment in the sector had grown to more than 8.8 million. 

Manufacturing-type jobs, both union and non-union, have shriveled in both absolute and percentage terms. In 2000, 2.1 million of the nearly 11.1 million Americans in production occupations (19.0%) were union members. Last year, total employment in that category (which consists mostly of manufacturing-related jobs but also includes bakers, tailors and jewelers, among others) was 8.1 million, only a million of whom (12.4%) were union.

Over that same timespan, unionization rates in installation, maintenance and repair occupations fell from 21.2% to 15.5%. In construction and extraction occupations (such as carpenters, oilfield workers and miners), unionization fell from 23.8% to 19.3%.

The two occupational groups with the highest unionization levels in 2017 were protective service, such as police officers, firefighters and security guards (34.7%), and education, training and library (33.5%). Perhaps not surprisingly, both groups are composed largely of public-sector workers. In 2017, federal, state and local governments had far higher unionization rates overall (26.6%, 30.3% and 40.1%, respectively) than the private sector taken as a whole (6.5%).

When it comes to industries, meanwhile, utilities (electric, gas and water suppliers) had the highest overall unionization rate last year – 23.0%, though that was down from 28.3% as recently as 2010. Transportation and warehousing had the second-highest private-sector unionization rate, 17.3%, but also saw the biggest decline (8.4 percentage points) since 2000. That year, more than a quarter (25.7%) of workers in that industry belonged to a union.

Not all the news is bleak for labor unions. The total number of unionized workers has grown modestly in recent years: up about 451,000 between 2012 and 2017, to just over 14.8 million. Most of that increase has occurred in two occupational categories: construction and extraction workers and healthcare practitioners and technicians. The construction industry, which was hammered (so to speak) by the housing collapse a decade ago, has recovered most of the 2.2 million jobs it shed between 2006 and 2010. The health care and social assistance industry was barely affected by the Great Recession, and has added more than 1.7 million jobs in the past six years alone.

Globally, the U.S. ranks 29th in its overall unionization rate among the 36 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most of which are developed democracies. However, like the U.S., nearly all OECD countries have experienced unionization declines , even those with strong and long-established labor movements: Sweden, for example, has seen its unionization rate fall from 79% in 2000 to 66.1% last year.

More Americans view the long-term decline of organized labor negatively than positively, according to the Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. About half (51%) say the large reduction in union representation in recent decades has been mostly bad for working people, while 35% say it has been mostly good. Blacks, young adults and people with advanced degrees were most likely to view declining union representation negatively. There also were sharp partisan splits, with 68% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents saying the reduction in union membership has been mostly bad for working people and 53% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying it’s been mostly good.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published April 27, 2015.

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Majorities of adults see decline of union membership as bad for the U.S. and working people

A look at black-owned businesses in the u.s., from businesses and banks to colleges and churches: americans’ views of u.s. institutions, 2023 saw some of the biggest, hardest-fought labor disputes in recent decades, older workers are growing in number and earning higher wages, most popular.

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