Ian M (CC BY-SA 2.0)
United Academics Rally before their last bargaining session with University of Oregon administrators, December 2024.
Majorities of Americans say their top political issue is affordability. That means we can expect policymakers to increasingly focus on cost-of-living issues. As we close in on the midterms, this focus will become even more intense.
So far, the affordability agenda has targeted the important goal of reducing costs. But prices are only half of the equation. A true affordability agenda should also raise wages, and one of the most effective ways to ensure that outcome is to support unions and collective bargaining.
In our roles with the Center for American Progress, a national nonprofit group, we helped produce a new study, which found that, by moving to sectoral bargaining, the share of Americans represented by unions could rise from 11 percent to 29 percent. That would restore America’s workforce to a level of union representation that once played a key role in ensuring that the fruits of all workers’ labors were fairly shared.
Sectoral bargaining is a type of collective bargaining between workers and firms that creates minimum standards for an industry or occupation. It typically operates in conjunction with worksite bargaining, which is the level where most collective bargaining in the United States occurs.
Achieving sectoral bargaining will take significant reforms to federal labor law, such as doing away with “right-to-work,” though there are some emerging state models to build upon.
When workers bargain together as part of a union, they are able to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Union workers make, on average, about 13 percent more than comparable non-union workers. Still, current law affords private employers too many ways to bust unions and makes it very hard for workers to act on their strong desire to bargain collectively.
In our new research, we attempt to estimate how many more American workers would be covered by union contracts if U.S. policy encouraged sectoral bargaining. Our model is based on sixty years of data on advanced economies around the world. It shows that countries with sectoral bargaining, like Denmark, generally have much higher union membership and collective bargaining coverage than countries with workplace-level bargaining, like the U.S. and Canada.
Our statistical techniques control for the many differences between countries, but because of various international differences in culture and the power dynamics of labor and capital, we won’t swear by the magnitude of our estimate. But what we can say for sure is that if we shifted to less isolated forms of union coverage, American unionization and bargaining coverage would rise significantly.
Our simulation suggests that if we moved from workplace to sectoral bargaining, collective bargaining coverage would increase, as noted, from roughly 11 percent of the total workforce to 29 percent. That means about forty-two million workers would earn the higher wages and benefits of a union contract—up sharply from the current sixteen million.
If you’re thinking that could never happen here, allow us to point out that it already did. In the 1940s and 1950s, American union membership and collective bargaining coverage rates peaked at around one-third—roughly triple the rates of the prior decade because of pro-union policy changes. Much of the bargaining was done towards a sectoral level.
During that same time period of increasing unionization and collective bargaining, the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent rose sharply, hitting its highest level on record, which hasn’t been broken in the seventy years since.
These are correlations, with many powerful forces in play. We do not want to oversimplify, but neither should we abandon common sense. Affordability is straining American households.
Policy solutions on the price side of the equation are in the making, but we also need to address the wage side. By moving to sectoral bargaining, in addition to other needed labor law reforms, we can give millions of workers a chance to get the union representation they seek, and in so doing, also help them to close the gap between their incomes and their costs.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.