In the United States, we face a critical juncture for the rights of employees to organize. Workers have faced wage stagnation, difficult working conditions, and a wholesale effort to decimate their ability to organize for the past several decades. Exploitation by employers of labor laws that have been made toothless has caused union membership to fall dramatically from 33 percent in 1956 to ten percent in 2022. As it stands, no meaningful penalties exist for corporations using illegal tactics to eliminate the option to organize. Workers, already facing record income inequality, now face job losses due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we know the reality is that we went into this pandemic with three ongoing interconnected crises: economic inequality, racial inequality, and climate change. 

Based on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s statistics, we know that unions consistently provide working Americans with ten to twenty percent higher wages than non-unionized workers. Workers who are union members fare better in crises—whether the crisis is COVID-19 or climate change. During crises, unionized workers have better access to enhanced safety measures, unemployment insurance, additional pay, paid sick time, and input in the terms of furloughs or other job-saving arrangements.

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