Increased union membership is key to cushion recessions

Recessions always inflict the most pain on Americans in the middle and lower end of the income distribution range, destroying jobs, eroding wages and wiping out savings for those working in industries such as construction, manufacturing, hospitality and retail.

But the crushing economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have reached levels unseen in the last four decades, and the long-term scarring will be severe without intervention from Congress – not just in the form of emergency relief, but also with targeted policy solutions.

One solution lawmakers should prioritize is a historic workers’ rights proposal, given that defanged labor protections are a large part of the reason the downturn has been so devastating to those who can least afford it. We need to bring back fairness to an economy that is increasingly plagued by a fundamental imbalance of power between workers and employers. And at a time when our nation is engaged in a vital conversation about economic justice, we need to make union membership a civil right.

When the pandemic struck, only about one in ten workers were unionized, a steep decline from the nearly one-third of workers who were members of a union in 1964, myself among them. As a result, millions of Americans—many of them essential workers—were left without a voice at the table when employers were deciding their fate. They had no ability to minimize layoffs or to define what paid sick leave would look like during the pandemic.

The consequences of this are hard to overstate. At the peak of the pandemic, jobs in low-wage occupations—many of which have chronically low rates of union membership, such as food services—disappeared at roughly eight times the rate at which high-wage jobs did. This inequity has especially ravaged communities of color.

It’s long past time to reverse the trend in declining union membership.