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    Hotspring 44's Avatar
    Hotspring 44
     

    Study: "Union decline lowers wages of nonunion workers"

    Union decline lowers wages of nonunion workers
    The overlooked reason why wages are stuck and inequality is growing.”
    Report • By Jake Rosenfeld, Patrick Denice, and Jennifer Laird • August 30, 2016

    Here are some snippets from the rather long article.
    Note that some of the type in bold I added to the actual wording in the article for emphasis and does not show up as such in the article itself; however, I did not change the wording.
    Quote Executive summary
    Pay for private-sector workers has barely budged over the past three and a half decades. In fact, for men in the private sector who lack a college degree and do not belong to a labor union, real wages today are substantially lower than they were in the late 1970s.

    In the debates over the causes of wage stagnation, the decline in union power has not received nearly as much attention as globalization, technological change, and the slowdown in Americans’ educational attainment.
    Unions, especially in industries and regions where they are strong, help boost the wages of all workers by establishing pay and benefit standards that many nonunion firms adopt.


    But this union boost to nonunion pay has weakened as the share of private-sector workers in a union has fallen from 1 in 3 in the 1950s to about 1 in 20 today...
    Quote "Key findings from our report include the following:”
    NOTE: There are seven “key findings”, but I only listed two of them here:
    Quote 1- For nonunion private-sector men, weekly wages would be an estimated 5 percent ($52) higher in 2013 if private-sector union density (the share of workers in similar industries and regions who are union members) remained at its 1979 level...
    ...For a year-round worker, this translates to an annual wage loss of $2,704.


    For the 40.2 million nonunion private-sector men the loss is equivalent to $2.1 billion fewer dollars in weekly paychecks, which represents an annual wage loss of $109 billion
    .
    2- ...The story is different for women, and indeed were it not for steadily rising pay for many women in the private sector, the debate today would not be about the “big freeze” in wages but the “big cut.”

    Wage growth for nonunion women has been steady, ending around 25 percent higher in 2013 than three-and-a-half-decades earlier. The exception here is among private-sector nonunion women who have a high school diploma or less education. For this group, annual median wages for much of the past decades have been relatively flat.
    And by 2013, women with only a high school diploma or less education had seen their wages drop below levels that prevailed in 1979...
    Quote...the erosion of union membership was particularly severe among men, whose membership density (unionization rate) in the private sector fell from 34 percent in 1979 to just 10 percent in 2013.

    The erosion was even larger among men without a college degree, falling from 38 percent to 11 percent. Union membership was not as high among private-sector women as men in 1979, just 16 percent, so the drop by 2013 to 6 percent was not as severe (the fall among non–college graduate women was the same)...

    ...The decades-long erosion of unions has affected all industries and regions, and set the U.S. below other advanced democracies

    The reach of collective bargaining in the United States today is smaller than in other advanced democracies. For example, in France, Sweden, and Denmark over 80 percent of the total workforce (public and private sectors) is covered by union-negotiated agreements. In Germany over half of the workforce is covered, while Canada’s coverage rate is approximately double that of the United States.19
    Even at their peak, unionization rates in the United States varied dramatically by industry and location.

    The anchor of the U.S. labor movement was in manufacturing and extractive industries; unions never achieved comparable success in the service sector. Historically, organizing in the South proved exceptionally difficult, resulting in lower density rates in Southern states than in the Northeast and Midwest—labor’s traditional stronghold.20

    The effect of geographic and industry variation is that even when the labor movement was comparatively strong, certain pockets of the private sector had almost no union presence. For example, in 1979 just 3 percent of retail workers in the South belonged to a trade union.21 The decades-long erosion of density rates has affected all industries and all regions, extending the union-free pockets throughout the private sector.22.
    There is a whole lot more to the article and there are other factors which the article did not get into because they were not studying those specific aspects which I believe makes it far worse for a lot of people than the article mentions.

    What I am referring to is the lower of the low wage high school or less educated workers who may not necessarily be full-time workers who are excluded from this study (for good reason; for the accuracy and cohesiveness of the study).

    Considering that averaging is used in this study for each individual group that the study focused on, I'm thinking that the wages for some of the lowest income people, particularly men, when considering the weekly and annually amount less income, for them, as stated in the article is a much more substantial amount in the actual percentage of their total income...

    Whereas, in comparative terms; if one considers the percentage of the lowest income 'bracket' workers, the amount of dollars that the study states (that) is, in actuality missing (nonexistent) presently represents a gargantuan disparity which is all too commonly overlooked, ignored, or outright and intentionally obfuscated by particular entities who have been either profiteering from the situation or those who are at the bottom of the 'upper end” of the next one or two pay scales higher who fear they will become the next class who will be the upcoming 'sacrificial lambs” to loose-out if there becomes a worker-vs-employer-vs-unionization conflict.

    The URL of the complete article article is @:https://www.epi.org/publication/unio...eid=10c4649c7b
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