This ought to be fairly self-evident. That it isn't tells us something about our media and the American voters, neither very complimentary. It should also be noted that the Republican Party has been doing everything in its power to destroy the Unions. If you are a working person and you vote Republican, I'm sorry, you're nuts. Anyone who cares about the middle class ou! ght to support Unions, and here is the evidence.
The Middle Class Does Better In States With Lots Of Union Members
ALAN PYKE – Think Progress
The middle class brings home a substantially larger share of aggregate earnings in states that have high rates of union membership than in those where fewer workers are organized, a Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) analysis of Census data shows. Amid very high and still increasing income inequality, union density appears to offer some buffer for middle-class Americans.
By comparing the share of total income that went to the middle 60 percent of the population in each state to the level of union membership in each state, CAPAF’s David Madland and Keith Miller found that the states with the lowest rates of union membership return below-average shares of income to their middle-class residents. The income figures come from new Census data, and the union density figures come from UnionStats.com. In the ten most-unionized states, the middle class brought home 47.4 percent of total income. In the ten least-unionized states, that income share falls to 46.8 percent.
Given the size of the state income figures at play here, that 0.6 percentage point gap translates to billions of dollars. Madland and Miller note that in Pennsylvania, 0.6 percent of aggregate income for 2012 ‘would have equaled over $2 billion, or almost $700 per middle-class household.”
The finding shouldn’t surprise anyone. The rise of inequality over the past three decades tracks closely with the decline of union membership. Stronger unions mean stronger advocacy for policies that support workers, not just on the job but with regard to fiscal policy decisions that help set the path for what level of income inequality there will be.
Income inequality has intensified since the Great Recession officially ended in the summer of 2009. Rich people have captured an increasingly large share of the country’s income over the past three years, and everyone else’s piece of the pie has gotten smaller. While the official poverty rate has held steady since jumping up above 15 percent during the recession, other measures paint a bleaker picture. Nearly half the country is economically insecure, and one in seven American families cannot consistently put enough food on their tables.
Phi Beta Iota: It's all a great deal more complicated than simply having unions. First off, union leadership in the USA is corrupt, ignorant, and generally worthless to the cause of the average blue collar worker. Absent a government that requires national resilience and self-sufficiency, as well as holistic calculations of true cost across political-military, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains, the banks and their corporate minions will betray the public trust every time.
See Also [Includes Other Links]:
Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today
