Proof! Study Shows Union Busting Hurting Economy & Middle Class

It is also worth noting when reading the following article, that the right may have won, barely, in the senate recall elections in Wisconsin, but they were only able to do so through a wide range of dirty tricks, illegal voter suppression through robocalls and mass mailing to Democrats, and a whole lot of money, notably from the Koch brothers, and the Amway family fortune.  What started as another election ended as another political auction.

Keep that in mind the next time you fill up your vehicle with gasoline, or consider an amway product...

I like to go to the primary sources whenever I can, and encourage readers here to do the same; so here is the link to the study referenced below:

Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality


Bruce Western[a]
Jake Rosenfeld[b]

aHarvard University
bUniversity of Washington
Abstract
From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education.

And here is an excellent analysis of how that study is reflected in the politics taking place right next door; a dangerous political ideology which the right would love to extend into Minnesota if they could, and across the country.  This would be disastrous, because the right endorses an utterly failed economic policy which only advantages the 2% who are very wealthy, and the uppermost executives of corporations.
from aol news:

Declining Union Power To Blame For Rising Wage Inequality


By Claire Gordon, Posted Aug 10th 2011 @ 11:58AM

Wage inequality has ballooned in the last forty years, thanks in large part to the declining power of unions, according to a study published this month in the American Sociological Review, and reported by the New York Times.

Between the years 1973 and 2007, the study found that wage inequality rose 40 percent. In this same period, private sector union membership plummeted 34 to 8 percent among men and 16 to 6 percent among women. These drops explain one third of the increase of wage inequality among male workers and one fifth of the increased inequality among their female counterparts, the study concludes.


Climbing income inequality is usually blamed on technological changes, immigration, outsourcing, and the relative increase in wages for college graduates. The studies two authors found, however, indicate that waning union power is just as significant as any of these factors.

Private sector union membership is now lower than it was in 1935, when the Wagner Act, which protects workers' right to organize, came into force. Unions swelled after World War II, but since the early 1970s, Big Labor has been steadily and relentlessly shrinking.

This has reduced the political power of all workers, according to the study. Unions have long advocated for more equalized wages for labor, by opposing, for example, the radical deregulation of financial markets and the explosion of executive pay. "Union decline marks an erosion of the moral economy and its underlying distributional norms," the study claims. "Wage inequality in the nonunion sector increased as a result.

These findings support past research, which has shown that countries with strong unions, like Canada and Germany, have a flatter economic playing field.

The declining power of private sector unions has also produced another kind of wage inequality: between public and private sector workers. 36.2 percent of government workers are unionized, and thus have greater political clout on average than private employees.

As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker likes to say, unions are the "haves" and the largely private-sector employed taxpayers are the "have-nots." But as this study tells us, organized Labor has been critical in battling the other war of "haves" and "have nots": corporate and Wall Street interests versus the average worker.

It is these tensions that came to ahead in Wisconsin's recall elections on Tuesday. Of the four Republican state senates seat up for grabs, Democrats managed to wrest only two away. Republicans have successfully kept control of the senate, and are calling it a big win. But if Wisconsin is a microcosm of the country on this issue, Americans are split almost perfectly down the middle, divided on which "have not" to defend.

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