Forty years ago, about one-quarter of American workers belonged to unions, and those unions were a major economic and political force. Now union membership is down to 11.2% of the U.S. workforce, and it’s increasingly concentrated in the public sector – only 6.7% of private-sector workers were union members in 2013.
Professors and pundits have for years been dissecting the causes of labor’s decline. What don’t get talked about so much, though, are the consequences. In “What Unions No Longer Do,” Jake Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, attempts to empirically establish the consequences of Big Labor’s decline. Here are the four big things that, according to Rosenfeld, unions in the U.S. no longer do:
EQUALIZE INCOMES. Income inequality (as measured by what the 90th-percentile worker makes versus the 10th-percentile worker) remains much lower among unionized workers than nonunionized workers. But remember, only 11% of U.S. workers are now unionized, and Rosenfeld shows that unions’ ability to affect wages for nonunion workers in the same region or industry sector – which used to be significant – is now negligible. Rosenfeld estimates that about a third of the rise in income inequality since the 1970s is due to unions’ decline.
COUNTERACT RACIAL INEQUALITY. Unions once shepherded millions of their African-American members into the middle class, and helped bring black and white wages closer together. Since unions fell into sharp decline in the private sector in the 1970s, however, the private-sector wage gap between blacks and whites has grown. In the much more unionized public sector, the wage gap has narrowed for black men, although black women have lost some ground to white women.
ASSIMILATE IMMIGRANTS. In the first half of the 20th century, immigrants found their way in great numbers into unions. For the recent great wave of Hispanic immigrants, that hasn’t been the case. There have been a few noteworthy unionization campaigns among immigrants, like the United Farm Workers in California’s fields. But on the whole, Hispanics are less likely to be union members than other workers are.
GIVE LOWER-INCOME AMERICANS A POLITICAL VOICE. As political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page documented in a recent study, the policy preferences of organized interest groups and Americans in the 90th income percentile seem to carry a lot more weight in political decision-making than those of Americans in the 50th percentile. Unions used to be perhaps the most important organized interest group. But not only are unions a much weaker political force than they used to be, they also no longer really represent those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The decline of unions in the U.S. has often been painted as inevitable, or at least necessary for American businesses to remain internationally competitive. There are some industries where this account seems accurate. Globally, though, the link between unionization and competitiveness is actually pretty tenuous. The most heavily unionized countries in the developed world – Denmark, Finland and Sweden – also perennially score high on global competitiveness rankings.
Even if the decline of unions was inevitable or desirable, that still leaves those tasks unions once accomplished – which on the whole seem like things that are good for society, and good for business – unattended to. Who’s going to do them now?
(Justin Fox is Executive Editor, New York, of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”)
