Afternoon Must-Read: Evan Soltas: To Say Unions Are Essential to Reduce Inequality Is a Counsel of Despair

Evan Soltas: Why Unions Can’t Be Saved: “I’m grateful to Michael Wasser of ‘Jobs With Justice’, a labor-rights organization, for writing a reply to my Bloomberg post this week on the death of American labor unions.

Wasser’s argument is straightforward: Unions aren’t dead yet, and they are the only way to get public policies that advance labor and reduce inequality…. I disagree…. I think unions are far more likely to grow weaker over, say, the next ten years than they are to grow stronger. And I think that there are many other ways to advance labor–ways that are, to my taste, preferable to re-unionization…. [I think the] union decline has been driven by economic competition… [and] that U.S. labor law had limited impact. If the decline is permanent, furthermore, Wasser’s claim about uniqueness… is merely a statement of pessimism. Yet I still find that pessimism implausible if one considers this graph (via Jared Bernstein) showing the broad increase in wages in the 1990s…. Unionization was also low then. How did wages rise so quickly, then, for the bottom half of the wage distribution? You can thank full employment. The chart Wasser puts at the top of his post–the strong negative relationship between unionization and inequality–is the reason he thinks unions are needed. As for me, it’s the reason I think unions are doomed.