The Union Shield

Illinois has nearly 10 percent unemployment, wage stagnation and the top 1 percent earning 635 percent more than the median employed worker. A report by Robert Bruno and Frank Manzo of the University of Illinois unlike other accounts of today’s economic woes, the authors don’t attribute the blame solely to the global financial collapse. The report’s findings strongly suggest that the decline of unionization has played a considerable role in the increase of income inequality in Illinois.

Union membership among working-age Illinois residents has fallen from 20.6 percent in 2002 to 17.2 percent. The findings also suggest that this decline may have been a factor in pushing income inequality to extremes. The salary boost of belonging to a union worker—some $10,682 for workers making a median wage of $43,687—goes up for low-income workers. The bottom 25 percent of nonunion earners make an average of $15,471, while the bottom 25 percent of union earners makers $27,406. A similar gap appears in the bottom 10 percent of each group, with union workers earning an average of $14,685 and non-union workers earning an average of $3,701. The authors conclude that with the power to considerably boost incomes in the lowest brackets, unionization can prevent the lower-earning workers from descending into poverty. For the top 25 percent of union workers, gains from being in a union are more modest, incomes average $61,884, compared with $57,692 for nonunion workers. The report's findings indicate that higher unionization could help shrink Illinois' income gaps.

 Illinois workers have only “somewhat more financial security and slightly higher prospects for finding a job” than during the darkest days of the recession. Even under these grim conditions, unionized workers generally have higher wages and have more financial security for their retirement—benefits that nonunion workers don’t always enjoy, rendering them more vulnerable to the dire effects of economic recession. The report, State of Working Illinois, shows that unions can provide workers and economies with invaluable armor to withstand crises like the Great Recession.

From here