By Liz Shuler | Heidi Shierholz:
Ask an everyday working American, and they’ll likely tell you there’s something fundamentally wrong with our economy. Across industries, big cities, and small towns, working people are struggling. Their paychecks aren’t stretching far enough. They stress over every expense and struggle to cover rent and electric bills, let alone take their families to dinner once in a while. Meanwhile, our research shows that top CEOs gave themselves massive raises in 2025 and now make well over 300 times what typical workers are paid.
As everything gets more and more expensive, we believe there is a powerful solution: unions.
Union contracts raise pay for workers. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that tripling union membership in this country would deliver a 14.5% raise to the median worker—more than $7,700 a year or the equivalent of 7.5 extra weeks of pay annually. This adds up to nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. Unions can also be powerful tools for combating racial pay discrimination; the new report shows tripling union membership would narrow the racial wage gap by more than a third.
Tripling union density wouldn’t only benefit union members. Nonunion workers would also see large raises, because strong unions lift standards across the economy. All told, EPI estimates that tripling union membership would shift $1.2 trillion of wealth in the economy to working people every year, reversing a third of the rise in inequality since 1979. And because union workers can win better benefits like health insurance, tripling union membership would also provide health care to 6.8 million more Americans. It’s what the labor movement calls the union difference: higher wages, access to health care, retirement security, paid time off and sick leave, and dignity on the job.
An economy where 30% of workers are union members isn’t a pipe dreamーit’s part of our own history. After New Deal policies of the 1930s and 40s secured workers’ legal rights, union membership soared. In the 1950s, union membership was above 30%, and working people saw huge gains. Wages grew, and racial wage gaps shrank. READ MORE…
