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Thursday, September 13, 2007
Unions Improve Low-Wage Work
From Inclusion and CEPR, a great report on how unions can raise incomes and benefits for low-wage workers. Unionized workers in low-wage jobs made 16 percent more than non-unionized workers, and were 25 percent more likely to get health insurance, and 25 percent more likely to get a pension. And that matters a lot:
These union effects are large by any measure. To put these findings into perspective, between 1996
and 2000, a period of sustained, low unemployment that helped to produce the best wage growth
for low-wage workers in the last three decades, the real wage of 10th percentile workers (who make
more than 10 percent of workers, but less than 90 percent of workers), rose, in total, about 12
percent. The union wage effect was one third larger (16 percent) than the full impact of four years of
historically rapid real wage growth.
Ensuring shared prosperity is anti-poverty policy, and union promotion is anti-poverty policy.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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