Posts tagged wage gap
Unions don’t deliver for workers
July 11, 2025 // Take the recent UPS layoffs. In August 2023, the Teamsters Union touted its new UPS contract as a historic victory, claiming historic wage increases and increased benefits. Fast forward to January 2024, when UPS announced it was eliminating 12,000 jobs. Just a year later, it said it was cutting its delivery business with Amazon in half by the second half of 2026 and was aiming to shutter 10% of its buildings. Why the cuts? Because the union’s monopoly bargaining power allows it to demand wages that make it tough for companies to stay competitive. When costs climb, even giants like UPS have little choice but to cut jobs or invest less in the future. The UPS saga is a shining example of what the Mercatus report highlights: union power can backfire, leaving workers worse off in the long term.
Do More Powerful Unions Generate Better Pro-Worker Outcomes?
May 15, 2025 // Unionization is generally associated with higher wages for lower-skilled unionized workers.[37] However, when unionized sectors set higher wages, excess workers shift to nonunionized sectors, increasing the labor supply and lowering wages for lower-skilled nonunion workers.
Give women more choice at work this Equal Pay Day
March 26, 2025 // One action politicians can take to benefit women is to give them more choice in the workplace so that they are compensated in a way that is most valuable to them. For example, some Americans, including many mothers, would prefer additional paid time off rather than additional pay for extra work. Currently, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that covered nonexempt employees receive overtime pay for working overtime hours. Accumulating paid leave is not an option.
Labor Day: Workers on Their Jobs
August 28, 2024 // *Satisfaction with pay and benefits always trail satisfaction with workplace environments. Today, negative assessments of the economy as a whole may be depressing attitudes on some job characteristics. Still, in Gallup’s latest, only 13 percent were very dissatisfied with what they earned. *Employed Americans are reasonably confident of their own job security. Those numbers dipped to a low point in the Great Recession but have been more positive since.
Latinas, the lowest-paid group in the U.S., turn to unions for better wages, report says
May 28, 2024 // Latinas are the lowest paid demographic in the United States, one of the reasons union membership among them is increasing, bucking the national downward trend of at least four decades, according to a report released this week by the National Women's Law Center (NWLC). The document, a fact sheet on union membership analyzing relevant trends among workers from all demographics in the United States, highlights that through 2023 women made up almost half of union members (45.6%).
Liz Shuler Wants AI to Reinvigorate the Labor Movement
April 2, 2024 // Fast forward a few years, and the world has evolved. Shuler is now the president of the AFL-CIO, having moved into the top spot in the summer of 2021, following the death of the organization’s longtime leader, Richard Trumka. Thanks to artificial intelligence, anxiety about technology’s impact on job security has only increased — not only among kitchen workers, but also white-collar professionals who long saw themselves as immune from disruption: writers, lawyers, health care professionals, marketers, financial analysts.
More Cannabis Workers Push For Unionization To Break Industry Barriers
November 29, 2022 // With cannabis workers in their ranks that range from processors, budtenders, chefs, and lab workers to cultivators and delivery personnel, the UFCW International sees their "Cannabis Organizing" campaign as a multi-pronged effort to increase the power of workers' voices, break the stigma around cannabis that exists in communities of color, increase the number of minority cannabis dispensary license holders and level the equity playing field in a rapidly growing industry.