Dreaming big on Labor Day: What if union membership tripled nationwide?

Baristas at Starbucks have organized at over 700 locations nationwide, including in St. Anthony.

About 15 million American workers are union members, but polling shows that some 50 million more would join a union today if they could.

What if that happened?

That’s the question researchers at the Economic Policy Institute sought to answer in a first-of-its-kind report, “The Case for Tripling Union Membership,” published in July.

Tripling union membership, from roughly 10% of the workforce to 30%, would restore union density to levels not seen since the 1950s, when union power delivered rising wages for working people, helped narrow racial wage gaps and built a thriving middle class.

In their new report, EPI researchers argue that similar benefits are possible today: higher wages across the board, lower inequality, stronger communities and a healthier democracy. The report also shares a policy roadmap to boost union membership and expand the benefits of collective bargaining.

“Tripling union membership is not a nostalgic pipe dream,” EPI President Heidi Shierholz said. “It is exactly what workers want, and federal and state policymakers have a clear roadmap to make it happen.

“Collective bargaining is the most effective tool for workers to raise their wages and secure a fair share of economic growth. If policymakers are serious about tackling affordability problems, expanding union membership and collective bargaining should be at the center of their agenda.”

The report estimates that tripling union membership would:

• Deliver a 14.5% raise for the median worker, amounting to more than $7,700 annually – or nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. Increases would apply union and nonunion workers alike.
• Shift $1.2 trillion to workers annually. This would reverse one-third of the increase in inequality experienced since 1979.
• Raise worker earnings in every state, including by an estimated $6,500 annually in Minnesota and $9,200 in Wisconsin.
• Significantly narrow racial wage gaps. Because unions tend to boost wages more for Black and Hispanic workers than for white workers, tripling union membership would close racial wage gaps by more than one-third.
• Increase the number of people covered by health insurance. Greater collective bargaining power would reduce the number of nonelderly people going without health insurance by about 25%.
• Strengthen communities. States with high union density invest more in public education, have higher unemployment insurance recipiency rates and have all adopted Medicaid expansion.
• Protect democracy. Unions boost voter turnout, equip workers with civic skills and actively defend voting rights. States with high union density have passed far fewer voter restriction bills than low-density states.

Of course, tripling union membership won’t actually happen overnight. Organizing is deliberate work that requires the investment of energy and resources – a commitment the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, made at its constitutional convention in June, pledging to organize 2 million new members over the next five years.

Unions have also pushed policymakers to modernize federal labor law and even the playing field in workplace organizing drives.

The report unveils two new policy proposals designed to grow collective bargaining and union density – proposals that, authors say, are “built to work alongside” organized labor’s top policy priorities, the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act.

One proposal would guarantee annual raises for newly unionized workers. A mandatory cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) would provide a meaningful guardrail for workers whose first contract bargaining ends up in arbitration – and undercut the employer’s ability to drag out the process.

The other ambitious proposal: require collective bargaining as the default option when CEO-to-worker pay ratios exceed 100-to-1. “Declining unionization and the stratospheric rise in CEO pay are deeply connected,” EPI’s researchers said. “Strengthening the bargaining power of workers in severely imbalanced companies would enable them to capture a larger share of the wealth their work creates.”

The report also calls on states to repeal so-called “right-to-work” laws and ensure collective bargaining rights for all public-sector workers, which alone would increase union density nationally from 9.9% to 14.4%.