Unions Will Help Rebuild the Middle Class

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEVIN of Michigan. Madam Speaker, later today we will debate the PRO Act, and we will pass the PRO Act to free up American workers to form unions and bargain collectively just because they darn well please without interference from their employer. And when we debate the PRO Act, Madam Speaker, we will get into all the details of the provisions of the PRO Act, which are really incredible, and I am very excited about that.

But right now, I want to talk about what a difference the PRO Act would make, why it would be a game changer for the working people of this country.

First of all, let's talk about productivity. American workers are incredibly productive. In the whole period during and after World War II when Americans were forming unions, thanks to the National Labor Relations Act, and up to a third of private-sector workers were in unions, wages and productivity rose in lockstep. You can't even separate them.

But then in the late seventies when we started deregulating airlines and deregulating trucking, and when Ronald Reagan became President and busted the air traffic controllers union, PATCO, and the union-busting business came up, and union membership started declining, productivity kept zooming up, but workers' compensation was totally flat. Since 1979, productivity has increased 70 percent, but compensation only 12 percent.

What about income inequality? We can go to the next one. For the last 100 years, income inequality has tracked union membership almost exactly. So if you take the share of income taken by the top 10 percent of the workforce, you can see that as union membership grew, income inequality fell.

Look at the difference the National Labor Relations Act itself made. In 1935, union membership shot up. The wages of the top 10 percent shot down as a share of everybody. We got more equal. We achieved the American Dream. And now with 1,000 cuts to union membership, when we are down to 6 percent of private-sector workers being in unions, there has been this incredible divergence, and the wealthy have taken all of the gains, and workers aren't in unions anymore.

And let's look at some specific stuff as we get the next slide up here. Let's start with benefits. Union members have more benefits and better benefits almost across the board. Here are just a couple of examples: 86 percent of union members have access to paid sick leave, as opposed to 72 percent of nonunion workers; and 94 percent of union members have access to healthcare benefits, compared to just two-thirds of nonunion workers.

And it is not on this slide, but more than half of union members have access to defined benefit pensions, real pensions, and only a small fraction of nonunion workers do.

Finally, let's look at wages in the next one. For all workers across the private sector, union members make about $1,150 a week more.

We are here debating, and finally we are passing, $1,400 for poor families one time. Union members earn $1,150 more every week through their own labor because they negotiated for it. That is $7,800 a year more.

And finally, if we look at the next slide--and Rick is doing an awesome job here; I appreciate you--it is especially important for women and workers of color. Look at this: This shows that across all categories of American workers, White, Black, and Latinx men and women workers make more. Women make $11,752 a year more if they are union members than if they are not. African-American workers make $10,088 a year more if they are union members. And Latinx workers make almost $14,000 a year more, $13,936.

Madam Speaker, any way you slice it, when we give workers the power to form unions at their workplace, they lift themselves up, they lift up their families, they lift up all the nonunion workers around them because the nonunion employers have to raise wages to keep up with the unionized workers, and they lift up our country.

Let's pass the PRO Act and rebuild the middle class of this country.

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