The era of broadly shared American prosperity — the postwar decades when a single income could support a family, buy a house, send kids to college, and retire with dignity — was not an accident. It was the product of organized labor. Union membership at its peak covered 35% of the American workforce. Union contracts set the floor for wages and benefits that even non-union employers had to compete with. The middle class was not given to workers. It was negotiated.
The sustained destruction of union power over the last fifty years — through right-to-work laws, hostile labor boards, the outsourcing and offshoring of unionized industries, the deliberate misclassification of workers as independent contractors, and the aggressive anti-union tactics of major employers — has been one of the primary drivers of wage stagnation and inequality.
Today, union membership stands at under 10% of the private sector workforce. The results are visible everywhere: stagnant wages, vanishing pensions, the gig economy’s systematic stripping of worker protections, warehouse and delivery workers monitored by algorithm and fired by app. Amazon, the second-largest employer in the country, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting worker organizing — because it works.
The PRO Act — which would have strengthened organizing rights and limited union-busting tactics — passed the House twice and was blocked both times in the Senate. The legal framework for labor relations has not been fundamentally updated since 1947.
Workers have the right to organize. They have the right to bargain collectively. And they have the right to a fair share of the value they create.
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