Post-New Deal America Needs Unions

prospect.org — Tens of millions of Americans work in WalMart’s America — in a low-wage labor market not subject to foreign competition. That’s a primary reason why economic inequality has soared in recent decades, why intergenerational economic mobility has fallen behind the levels in presumably sclerotic Europe, why wages are at their lowest share of both GDP and corporate revenues since the end of World War II. The shift in income from wages to profits is above all the result of the weakening of unions. Anyone who says that America needed unions once but doesn’t today is willfully blind. Those who defend the right of private-sector workers to unionize—in theory, anyway—should open their eyes and look around them. There’s a nation out there in desperate need of unionization.

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