Union membership pays.
“Tripling union membership in the US would lead to a 14.5% raise for the median US worker, shifting $1.2tn to workers annually and significantly narrowing racial wage gaps, according to a new report released on Wednesday.
The report from the Economic Policy Institute notes that union membership rates across the workforce, also known as union density, was once three times as high as it is today. Union density in the 1950s was more than 30% before it started to decline in the 1960s. By the 1980s, union density dropped to 22.2% only to decline even further in recent decades, to 10% in 2025.
Despite the lower union density, public approval of labor unions has remained high in recent years, with more than 68% of Americans viewing unions favorably in 2025. More than 50 million US workers would join a union if they could.
The report notes that the decline in union density comes amid aggressive union busting by corporations and new anti-union laws. Declines in union density have also correlated to surges in wealth and income inequality. Since 1979, worker productivity has increased in the US at a pace 2.7 times faster than the pace of pay increases for workers.
‘By making it harder and harder for workers to organize and bargain collectively, the rich seized more and more income and wealth, destroying the US middle class,’ Robert Reich, former US secretary of labor, writes in the foreword of the report. ‘Now the wealth of the richest Americans has exploded: the richest 0.1% own more than five times the combined wealth of the entire bottom half of the country.'”
For the rest of the story, visit the Guardian here.