Questions What is a Labor Union? How does a Labor Union work? Why might a Labor Union be necessary? What is an example of a Labor Union? Who benefits from Labor Unions? Who are not fans of Labor Unions, why?

How today’s unions help working people Giving workers the power to improve their jobs and unrig the economy Americans have always joined together—whether in parent teacher associations or local community organizations—to solve problems and make changes that improve their lives and their communities. Through unions, people join together to strive for improvements at the place where they spend a large portion of their waking hours: work. The freedom of workers to join together in unions and negotiate with employers (in a process known as collective bargaining) is widely recognized as a fundamental human right across the globe. In the United States, this right is protected by the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law and is supported by a majority of Americans.1 Over 16 million working women and men in the United States are exercising this right—these 16 million workers are represented by unions. Overall, more than one in nine U.S. workers are represented by unions. This representation makes organized labor one of the largest institutions in America.2 By providing data on union coverage, activities, and impacts, this report helps explain how unions fit into the economy today; how they affect workers, communities, occupations and industries, and the country at large; and why collective bargaining is essential for a fair and prosperous economy and a vibrant democracy. It also describes how decades of anti-union campaigns and policies have made it much harder for working people to use their collective voice to sustain their standard of living. ‘Collective bargaining’ is how working people gain a voice at work and the power to shape their working lives Almost everyone has at one point felt unheard or powerless as an employee. Joining a union simply means that you and your colleagues have a say because you negotiate important elements of employment conditions together. That could mean securing wage increases, better access to health care, workplace safety enhancements, and more reasonable and predictable hours. Through collective bargaining negotiations, the union also works with management to develop a process for settling disputes that employees and their managers are unable to settle individually. Once a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is agreed to, union representatives work with employees and with management to make sure the rights and obligations spelled out in the agreement are honored. And they represent workers in high-stakes situations, such as when a safety violation has resulted in injury. By these means, collective bargaining gives workers a say in the terms of their employment, the security of knowing that there are specific processes for handling work-related grievances, and a path to solving problems. To cover expenses for negotiating contracts, defending workers’ rights, resolving disputes, and providing support to members of the bargaining unit, unions collect dues. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 and amendments govern private-sector unions and collective bargaining. While states generally have no jurisdiction over private-sector unions, the NLRA as amended does allow states to enact certain laws that govern fees paid by workers in unionized private workplaces (discussed later in this report). Nearly half (48.1 percent) of workers covered by a union contract are public-sector workers. Collective bargaining among federal workers is covered by the Federal Labor Relations Act of 1978 (FLRA). State laws (enacted from the late 1950s forward) govern state and local government employee unions. Each state has its own set of laws that govern collective bargaining for state and local public employees. Some states allow the full set of collective bargaining rights, others (approximately one-fifth) prohibit collective bargaining, and still others limit some activities, such as the right to strike or the right to collect dues automatically during payroll processing. About one in 10 states have no state law addressing collective bargaining rights in the public sector.3 Union workers are diverse, just like America The typical union member is often thought to be a worker on a manufacturing line in the Midwest. Manufacturing does have a strong union tradition, but people join unions in many industries and occupations. Union members include dental hygienists in Wisconsin, graduate students in Massachusetts, firefighters in Illinois, television writers and scientists in California, security guards in Washington, D.C., digital journalists in New York, and major league baseball players in Georgia and other states.4 It is also true that, in the past, union workers were predominantly white men. But as of 2016, roughly 10.6 million of the 16.3 million workers covered by a union contract are women and/or people of color.5 About two-thirds (65.4 percent) of workers age 18 to 64 and covered by a union contract are women and/or people of color. Almost half (46.3 percent) are women. More than a third (35.8 percent) are black, Hispanic, Asian, or other nonwhite workers. Black workers are the most likely to be represented by unions: 14.5 percent of black workers age 18 to 64 are covered by a collective bargaining agreement, compared with 12.5 percent of white workers and 10.1 percent of Hispanic workers. Unions represent workers of all levels of education More than half (54.5 percent) of workers age 18 to 64 and covered by a union contract have an associate degree or more education. Two out of five (42.4 percent) have a bachelor’s degree or more education. Union workers hail from a variety of sectors, but the biggest share work in education or health services Nearly two in five workers (39.8 percent) age 18 to 64 and covered by a union contract work in education or health services. One in seven workers (13.9 percent) covered by a union contract work in public administration. One in eight workers (12.2 percent) covered by a union contract work in transportation and utilities. One in 11 workers (9.1 percent) covered by a union contract work in manufacturing. Unions are most widespread in public administration and transportation industries Because industries vary in size, industries with the highest numbers of union workers aren’t always the industries with the highest union coverage rate. The five industries with the highest shares of 18- to 64-year-old workers covered by a union contract (the “union coverage rate”) are: Public administration (33.2 percent) Transportation and utilities (27.3 percent) Education and health services (20.0 percent) Construction (15.7 percent) Information (10.6 percent), which includes publishing, motion pictures, broadcasting, telecommunications, data processing, and other communications services Unions are thriving in diverse workplaces—including ‘new economy’ workplaces Working people join unions to have some say over their jobs and their workplaces. Given the self-determination unions afford, it is no surprise that they are thriving in some of the companies, industries, and occupations undergoing the most change. Television writers in Hollywood. Streaming services, cable offerings, and multiple viewing platforms are fueling what is referred to as “the New Golden Age of Television.” In 2016 the six major media companies that dominate film and television (CBS, Comcast, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, and Viacom) reported almost $51 billion in operating profits. Those profits have doubled in the last decade and continue to grow. Much of the industry’s success is attributable to the roughly 13,000 men and women who write television shows and films and who belong to the Writers Guild of America. Despite this contribution to the industry’s record profitability, TV writers’ incomes were in decline. WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (which represents the studios, networks, and independent producers) recently agreed on a collective bargaining contract that gave writers increases in compensation and digital residuals and preserved broad health care benefits.6 Graduate students and adjunct faculty working at universities across the country. More than 64,000 graduate student employees are unionized at 28 institutions of higher education in the public sector, including universities in California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Washington.7 While graduate teaching assistants in some public universities have practiced collective bargaining for nearly 50 years, the law has recently opened up the possibility in private universities: teaching and research assistants for universities such Yale, Brandeis University, Columbia, and Tufts University are now organizing for better compensation and working conditions.8 Professional and technical employees in the Washington, D.C., region and throughout the United States and Canada. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) includes more than 80,000 women and men in professional, technical, administrative, and associated occupations in the United States and Canada. Members work for a wide range of federal, public, and private agencies and companies. They include administrative law judges working for the Social Security Administration, scientists working for NASA, engineers and technicians working for General Electric and Boeing, and engineers, architects, and project managers working for Santa Clara County, California. The Economic Policy Institute is one of many unionized Washington-based nonprofits (including the Center for American Progress and DC Jobs With Justice) represented by IFPTE Local 70.9 United Parcel Service (UPS) drivers, hub workers, pilots, and mechanics. UPS is the country’s largest private-sector, unionized employer. Of 440,000 workers worldwide, nearly 250,000 (mostly drivers and hub workers) are represented by the Teamsters. UPS pilots are represented by the Independent Pilots Association, and UPS mechanics are represented by the International Association of Machinists. According to research firm Brand Keys, UPS is number one in parcel delivery loyalty, ahead of nonunionized FedEx.10 Maine lobster fishers. The Maine Lobstering Union formed in 2013 after a glut in the spring of 2012 that drove the “boat price” for lobster down about 33 percent to a 20-year low. It was the first fishing union in Maine in more than 75 years. While people who fish for a living in Canada and off the Washington and Alaska coasts have been organized for years, the 500-member Maine Lobstering Union seeks to close the growing gap between what consumers pay to eat lobster and what lobster fishers get. So the union is buying a wholesale lobster business. Union lobster fishers who sell to the union co-op will get market price for their lobster but also a share of cooperative profits.11 Cafeteria and other contract workers in Silicon Valley. In July 2017, more than 500 cafeteria workers who serve food at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, campus joined Local 19 of UNITE HERE, a labor union of more than 265,000 hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino workers in the United States and Canada. The Facebook cafeteria workers cannot afford housing in the extremely high-cost Bay Area and are seeking higher wages and more affordable health benefits from their employer, Flagship Facility Services. According to the San Jose Mercury News, “thousands of contract workers such as janitors, security guards, and shuttle bus drivers at other major Silicon Valley tech firms, including Apple, Intel, and Google,” have already unionized. The effort to unionize these workers is being led by Working Partnerships USA and the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council but counts other faith, community, and labor groups (including Communications Workers of America, Teamsters, and the Service Employees International Union) as partners.12 Digital journalists. The changing media landscape has been a recent catalyst for newsrooms to organize. Since 2014, editorial employees at many media outlets—including In These Times, Vice, Gizmodo Media Group (formerly Gawker Media), Salon, The American Prospect, Fusion, The Root, and ThinkProgress—have formed unions. The Huffington Post, for example, ratified a contract in January 2017 that has provisions addressing editorial independence, the need to enhance newsroom diversity, comp time, discipline and dismissal policies, and severance in the event of layoffs.13 Unions strengthen democracy by giving workers a voice in policy debates Managers, business owners, and CEOs organize to advocate for their economic interests. That’s what chambers of commerce, business associations, and national trade associations do. Unions provide working people who are not executives or company owners with an opportunity to get their voices heard in policy debates that shape their lives. Americans have a constitutionally protected right to associate and ask for change. Americans join together to change speed limits, school policy, laws governing gun ownership and drug possession and use, and more. And when Americans have wanted to make the economy fairer and more responsive to the needs of workers, they have traditionally joined together in unions to do so. Unions fought for—and work to strengthen—many of the humane standards and norms that protect and uplift Americans today. These essential laws and programs include Social Security, child labor laws, antidiscrimination laws, health and safety laws, Unemployment Insurance, compensation for workers who get hurt on the job, the 40-hour workweek, and the federal minimum wage.14 Unions were a major force behind all the Great Society laws on discrimination, housing, and voting rights. As union coverage has declined and the voice of workers has correspondingly diminished, many of the key workplace standards past generations counted on have been eroded. For instance, there has been an erosion of overtime pay protection, slashing of workers’ compensation programs, and a decline in the real value of the minimum wage, which is lower now than it was in 1968.15 Unions reduce inequality and are essential for low- and middle-wage workers’ ability to obtain a fair share of economic growth The spread of collective bargaining that followed the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 led to decades of faster and fairer economic growth that persisted until the late 1970s. But since the 1970s, declining unionization has fueled rising inequality and stalled economic progress for the broad American middle class. Figures A and B show that when unions are weak, the highest incomes go up even more, but when unions are strong, middle incomes go up. Research by EPI and other institutions shows this correlation is no accident. First, unions have strong positive effects not only on the wages of union workers but also on the wages of comparable nonunion workers, as unions set standards for entire industries and occupations (these union and nonunion wage boosts are explored in detail in the next section of this report). Second, unions make wages among occupations more equal because they give a larger wage boost to low- and middle-wage occupations than to high-wage occupations. Third, unions make wages of workers with similar characteristics more equal because of the standards unions set. Fourth, unions have historically been more likely to organize middle-wage than high-wage workers, which lowers inequality by closing gaps between, say, blue-collar and white-collar workers. Finally, the union wage boost is largest for low-wage workers and larger at the middle than at the highest wage levels, larger for black and Hispanic workers than for white workers, and larger for those with lower levels of education—wage increases for these groups help narrow wage inequalities.16 We know how big a force for equality unions are by looking at how much their decline has contributed to inequality between middle- and high-wage workers: union decline can explain one-third of the rise in wage inequality among men and one-fifth of the rise in wage inequality among women from 1973 to 2007. Among men, the erosion of collective bargaining has been the largest single factor driving a wedge between middle- and high-wage workers. Unions: How Do They Help Workers? Unions are voluntary associations of workers formed to improve the negotiating leverage of their members through collective bargaining.1 Workers and employers need each other to create economic value, but often disagree about how that value should be apportioned. Because owners of capital are typically much wealthier and often more powerful than individual suppliers of labor, such disagreements have historically tended to resolve in favor of capital. Unions rose as an effort to correct this imbalance in leverage, and they played a key economic role for much of the 20th century. More recently the power of unions has declined, though the tight labor market in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic aided high-profile unionization drives in services. KEY TAKEAWAYS Unions are worker groups formed to negotiate pay and working conditions with employers. Collective bargaining helps employees increase their leverage in contract negotiations. Half of union members in the U.S. are public employees like teachers and firefighters. Union members tend to earn more than non-union workers, in the U.S. and globally 27 U.S. states bar unions from requiring workers covered by their collective bargaining agreements to pay union dues. What Are Unions and What Do They Do? Labor unions are voluntary, democratic associations of workers. Trade unions are organized for a specific trade or occupation, while industrial unions represent workers in a particular industry.2 National unions can have many local chapters. U.S. workers can elect a union as their collective bargaining agent under the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).3 Collective bargaining is a negotiation in which a union and an employer or group or employers set pay and other working conditions for the union's members.4 Unions dissatisfied with collective bargaining results may call a strike under certain conditions, just as employers can lock out their workers.5 The NLRA defines and prohibits "unfair labor practices" by unions as well as management and requires both sides to bargain in good faith.67 The NLRA's terms are enforced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Unions may also engage in politics. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is a federation of 57 labor unions promoting laws and policies on behalf of union members.8 Who Belongs to Unions? The proportion of workers in the national labor force covered by collective bargaining varies widely by country, from well over 50% in much of western Europe to less than 10% in many developing countries.9 In the U.S., the proportion of union workers has dropped from about 35% in the mid 1950s and 20% in 1983 to little more than 10% of the workforce as of 2021.1011 Half of the union members in the U.S. worked in the public sector, where more than a third of the workforce was unionized, compared with about 6% in the private sector. Teachers, police officers and firefighters are among public employees most likely to belong to a union.10 As manufacturing employment that once served as the mainstay of union membership has declined, organizing efforts have extended into the service and professional industries where unions have previously lacked a foothold. In 2022, unionization drives succeeded in organizing workers at some Amazon.com (AMZN) warehouses, Starbucks (SBUX) coffee shops, and in The New York Times Company's (NYT) technology operations.121314 10.3% The share of the U.S. working population who were members of unions in 2021.15 Who Opposes Unions? In the U.S., industry groups often oppose unions and their legislative goals. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says its goal on union issues is to "fight back against the one-sided, anti-employer agenda of special interest organizations." The business group is strongly opposed to legislation providing additional protections for union organizers.1617 In 27 U.S. states, "right to work" laws allow non-union members to obtain the benefits of collective bargaining by unions without paying union dues.1819 The laws serve to undermine union financing and organizing.2021 Employers hostile to unions often assert a union could not secure better pay and working conditions than what they already provide for workers.22 In China, independent labor unions are illegal while official ones are controlled by a government-backed union not known for advocating on behalf of workers.23 Do Unions Work? Union wages are generally higher than non-union wages globally. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, full-time union members had median weekly earnings of $1,169 in 2021, versus $975 for those who were not union members.24 There is also evidence unions increase the pay of non-union workers.25 Like any democratic institution, organized labor is focused on the needs of current union members. This focus can at times result in big increases in long-term costs for employers, both public and private. It takes two sides to reach an economically unsustainable collective bargaining agreement, however. More often, collective bargaining leads to a compromise addressing the long-term economic needs of the employer as well as employees. In 2021, a higher-paid unionized workforce turned into a competitive advantage for United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) against non-union rival FedEx Corp. (FDX), resulting in lower employee turnover amid a labor shortage.26 The Bottom Line Unions have left their mark on the economy and continue to be a significant force shaping business and politics. Unions in a wide variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to the government, help workers secure higher wages and better working conditions. Questions What is a Labor Union? How does a Labor Union work? Why might a Labor Union be necessary? What is an example of a Labor Union? Who benefits from Labor Unions? Who are not fans of Labor Unions, why?