Month: September 2022

In polling data, Americans offer strong support for labor unions. But in practice, the share of US workers belonging to a labor union has been falling for decades. How will these competing tensions work themselves out?

A report by an interdisciplinary group of union-friendly labor market researchers under the auspices of the Worker Empowerment Research Network explores the current state of “U.S. Workers’ Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions” (June 2022). Specifically, the report is co-authored by Thomas A. Kochan, Janice R. Fine, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Suresh Naidu, Jacob Barnes, Yaminette Diaz-Linhart, Johnnie Kallas, Jeonghun Kim, Arrow Minster, Di Tong, Phela Townsend, and Danielle Twiss.

Here’s Gallup survey data on the share of Americans who say that they approve of unions. It has often hovered near 60%, the most recent survey (just available a week ago, and not shown in this graph) puts support at 71%.

In addition, a substantial share of US workers report that they would like to have more say in their workplace.

However, the share of US workers belonging to a union peaked back in the late 1940s and early 1950s at about one-third of the labor force. Here’s the share of private-sector US workers belonging to a union since the earlier 1970s.:

There are an array of possible explanations for this gap between what would seem to be support for unions and what unions can provide, and actual membership in unions. Those who support unions often emphasize that US labor law can make it hard to set up and win a union election in a given workplace. By international standards, the legal rules for setting up a union are objectively harder in the US than in most other high-income countries. However, it also seems true that many American workers who support unions in the abstract are much less supportive of unions in their own workplace, and often seem to mistrust whether an official union will focus and make progress on the day-to-day issues that matter to them as workers.

Given the steady downward trend of unionization rates over the decades, it seems unlikely that the current US legal framework for unionization is likely to lead to a renaissance of American unions any time soon. Indeed, the deeper issue here may be that the US legal framework for unionization is establishment-based–that is, it is primarily focused on workers who share a common location voting for a union. For company with many different locations–a current example is Starbucks–each location needs to vote for a union. Conversely, existing labor law about unionization is not focused on groups of workers: say, gig workers, part-time workers, workers who hold domestic jobs, adjunct professors and graduate students, farmworkers, mid-level managers, and others. The report notes:

A number of unions and other worker advocates argue that attempting to organize large, multilocation employers one location at a time is not a viable way to engage them in dialogue and/or negotiations on workers’ issues of concern. This has led to a range of different protests, mobilizing efforts, and political campaigns for new regulations aimed at
gaining a voice in decision-making and governance processes at the corporate level, where key employment and labor strategies and decisions are made. To date, very few of these efforts have been successful in bringing worker and corporate management representatives to a table for dialogue. What steps, via public policy, private actions, and/or dialogue across business and worker representatives at the firm, sector, or
national levels might explore ways to foster some form(s) of engagement?

When the report refers to a range of efforts, what sorts of things do they have in mind? Here are a few examples of institutions that seek to express concerns of labor, but do not involve a standard US-style dues-paying union based at a certain location:

Worker centers are “community-based mediating institutions that provide support to and organize among communities of low-wage workers. … Although worker centers were being founded throughout the 1980s and 1990s, their numbers began to increase substantially in the late 1990s. By 2005, there were at least 135 active worker centers in the U.S., up from roughly 30 in 1992. As of late 2018, there were at least 234 active worker centers in the U.S., and we have identified 12 new centers that have emerged since then.

A prominent example of a focused campaign that relies on political mobilization is Fight
for $15. Started by a group of fast-food workers in New York City in 2012 with extensive financial and organizational support from SEIU and Change to Win, Fight for $15 now operates in over 300 cities and six continents. The campaign has spread beyond fast food
to include other low-wage workers such as home care workers, airport workers, and adjunct professors. It relies on citywide and regional organizing committees that mobilize brief strikes in order to create political leverage and change the narrative on low-wage work.

Founded by Sara Horowitz in 1995, Freelancers Union is one of the longest-standing worker advocacy organizations that does not seek to achieve formal collective bargaining rights. A multi-occupational professional association promoting the interests of
independent workers through policy advocacy, benefits provision, resources, and community building, Freelancers Union has more than 500,000 members
nationwide. In recent years, Freelancers Union has pursued a variety of policy advocacy campaigns for independent contractors, including the 2017 enactment of the
Freelance Isn’t Free Act in New York City protecting independent contractors from nonpayment, and the inclusion of self-employed people in pandemic unemployment assistance benefits authorized in the CARES Act of 2020.

Coworker.org, founded in 2013, is a peer-based digital platform that provides online resources to workers engaging in workplace petition campaigns and other power-building strategies. Coworker.org’s petition site empowers workers to exercise their voice and push for better working conditions, as well as to bring greater public awareness to issues and challenges within specific worker communities. Coworker.org supports the collection of signatures among employees in organizations and also provides resources such as training, funds, and communication spaces that aim to help workers maintain large decentralized networks in workplaces. According to Coworker.org co-executive director Michelle Miller, the first two months of the pandemic saw a large increase in worker activities on the site. While dedicated to serving all types of workers, the past and current organizing activities on Coworker.org have mostly taken place in the low-wage service and retail sector and in the tech sector. Over 700 campaigns were listed on its site as this report was being prepared. Petitions target a range of issues, including wages and benefits, health and safety, the coronavirus, hiring and firing, paid sick leave, scheduling, dress code, staffing levels, discrimination and workplace harassment, training and development, and parental leave.

Accordingly, organizing among gig workers has risen, as these workers push for better
working conditions. Rideshare Drivers United, Gig Workers Rising, Gig Workers Collective, New York Taxi Workers Alliance, We Drive Progress, and Mobile Workers Alliance are examples of the worker advocacy organizations that are forming among workers who provide services for app-based platforms such as food delivery and ride-hailing.

The report offers a number of other examples of these kinds of organizations, as well as examples of situations in which substantial groups of workers carried out a “sickout” or a protest to make their point, outside of the standard union framework. As mentioned already, “very few of these efforts have been successful in bringing worker and corporate management representatives to a table for dialogue,” at least so far.

As the managing editor of an academic journal, inhabiting the broader universe of academia, I am continually stunned by how much people know about their given subject of choice. Robert E. Lucas captured some of that feeling in an interview back in 1998, when he was asked about whether it was important for economists to also be competent historians. Lucas replied:

No. It is important that some economists be competent historians, just as it is important that some economists be competent mathematicians, competent sociologists, and so on. But there is neither a need nor a possibility for everyone to be good at everything. Like Stephen Dedalus, none of us will ever be more than a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture.

(The quotation is from Brian Snowdon and Howard R. Vane, “Transforming macroeconomics:
an interview with Robert E. Lucas Jr.,” Journal of Economic Methodology, 1998, 5:1, 115-146, with the comment on p. 121.(

Of course, Stephen Dedalus is the protagonist in the 1916 James Joyce novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here’s the original “shy guest” comment from Joyce:

The pages of his timeworn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold; they were human pages and fifty years before they had been turned by the human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm Inverarity. Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender and vervain; but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

I’ve been Managing Editor here at the Journal of Economic Perspectives for 36 years now. I think I’m good at the job. But I’m still a shy guest at the feast.

I ran across a headline a few weeks ago in a US Census Bureau press release: “Teachers Are Among Most Educated, Yet Their Pay Lags.” The article itself is perfectly sensible, just offering statistics to point out that teachers often have lower pay than others who have BA degrees. But in seeing the headline, I was reminded of a feeling, sometimes expressed explicitly, that seems to me fairly common among those who work in the world of education: Many of us were above-average in the classroom, but our pay often does not reflect that. I’ve heard PhD economists point out, for example, that they had higher grades than many of those who went on to become lawyers and doctors, but the lawyers and doctors often make higher salaries.

The philosopher Robert Nozick once described this frame of mind in a 1998 essay called “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” He wrote:

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. … Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution `to each according to his merit or value.’ Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

In fairness, most academics accepted the economic limits on their professional with their eyes open. Personally, I have known for a long time that I won’t ever get a payout from stock options or an annual bonus for an especially good year. On the other side, my economics journal isn’t likely to go out of business in down year, either. I have steady and secure work that uses my skills and interests. I have perhaps one meeting every two or three weeks, and the rest of the time, I spend editing, thinking, reading, and writing. I’m responsible for schedules being met over time, but my organization is a small one, and my day-to-day work is self-directed. I don’t have to monitor people working for me, and I don’t have a boss monitoring me each day, or each hour. I’m generally happy with my work/life tradeoffs.

In addition, I know perfectly well that one’s wages are heavily determined by supply and demand for one’s skills, not by test scores (and a good thing, too). But I admit that sometimes, when I see an old friend, or meet a new acquaintance who has made more lucrative choices, and I hear about their patterns of consumption, I wonder just a little about the paths I have not followed. One of the great benefits of a free market society is the freedom to make choices about one’s work. But such choices also bring ineluctable tradeoffs.