Whaddaya know, I was just talking about how union workers have better access to health care than non-union workers do, and along comes a new study that reinforces the point.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released a report at the end of last month entitled "Unions and Upward Mobility for Low-Wage Workers." They examined the wages and benefits that workers get in fifteen different underpaid professions, from cashiers to janitors to home-care workers.
Key findings:
On average, in the low-wage occupations analyzed here, unionization raised workers' wages by just over 16 percent --about $1.75 per hour-- compared to those of non-union workers.
The union impact on health-insurance and pension coverage in low-wage jobs was even bigger. Union workers were 25 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 25 percentage points more likely to be in an employer-provided pension than similar non-union workers in the same low-wage occupations...
These union effects are particularly impressive given the widespread belief that many of the jobs analyzed here are inherently incapable of providing decent pay and benefits.
That last point is worth lingering on for a moment. One of the things that's driving America's growing economic inequality is that the job categories that are growing the fastest -- for the most part, jobs in the service sector -- are also the ones that many people believe (for whatever reason) are just inherently bad jobs.
But do these jobs have to be bad?
Of course not -- when the people who hold those jobs join together, they can take those underpaid jobs and turn them into the good jobs of the future: the jobs with paychecks that you can raise a family on, the jobs that provide quality health care and let you retire with dignity. That's the American Dream, and you can see in CEPR's numbers how unions are helping millions of working people keep it within reach.
