How Can Workers Get More Pay? Two Articles in Today's News

Eric Posner has an excellent essay in today's New York Times -- "You Deserve a Bigger Paycheck; Here's How You Might Get It" -- explaining how employers' monopsony power depresses workers' pay:

In highly concentrated labor markets, wages fall — as economic theory would predict. For example, Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt examined hospital mergers and found that when hospitals expand through mergers and gain significant market power, the wage growth of employees declines. Notably, this decline affected skilled health care professionals like nurses — but not administrators and unskilled staff members like cafeteria workers, who could easily find jobs outside hospitals.

The work on labor market concentration has been supplemented by growing evidence that employers collude with one another and engage in other anticompetitive practices.

One solution to this problem, Posner says, would be increased federal antitrust enforcement against companies exercising monopsony power in the labor market:

Antitrust law applies to “restraint of trade,” and courts agree that when employers enter cartels to suppress wages, they violate the law. Yet until a few years ago, there were hardly any antitrust cases against employers.

That is a good idea that would be most welcome by labor advocates. But federal enforcement, or even private lawsuits against employers, can only accomplish so much. Recognizing that employers have depressed wages "especially in rural areas and small towns," Posner does not proceed to the obvious conclusion that unionization can provide an important and effective counterweight to employers' power over workers' pay (yes, it is a short essay).

The stagnation, and even decline, of  real income for the working class and middle class has occurred during the Republicans' 40 year offensive against labor unions, beginning in the Reagan administration and continued by state legislatures. In Janus v. AFSCME, the U.S. Supreme Court held that unions could not collect "agency fees" from non-members, even though they were required by state law to represent non-members in collective bargaining and other matters. (Agency fees were set at about 78% of dues, excluding money spent on political and ideological lobbying.)

Even so, unionization remains the most effective way for workers to combine and enhance their own bargaining power, without depending on the initiative of the FTC or DOJ (which, as Posner notes, has not been much in evidence).

Also in today's news, the unionized food service employees at Northwestern have voted to authorize a strike for better pay -- their first raise in two years -- and uniform health coverage.  As reported in the Daily Northwestern,

The average Compass worker represented by the union UNITE HERE Local 1 made $27,843 in 2019 and hasn’t received a raise since then, according to a union news release.

In February, Compass [the outside contractor for Northwestern's food service] stopped providing health insurance to full-time workers who worked less than 40 hours per week. This policy change left 74 of the 260 active, full-time Compass workers without health insurance that month, the release said. 

Veronica Reyes, a cashier at Foster-Walker Complex, has worked at NU for 11 years. She makes $14.05 an hour and voted to authorize the strike, saying many of her co-workers lost their health insurance during the pandemic. 

“With this little money, I cannot support my family,” Reyes said. “It’s not right. We deserve more.” 

Reyes said she prefers to negotiate rather than strike, adding she doesn’t want to leave her job because she loves working with students. 

In-person classes on Northwestern's Evanston campus have just begun for the first time since March 2020. The food service workers have chosen the perfect time to amplify their bargaining power by endorsing a strike. And they don't need to wait for antitrust lawyers to take up their cause.

Comments

[Jeff Rice]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwbzxemJZIc

[Enrique]

Setting aside some board seats for rank and file workers might help too!

[Joseph Price]

https://youtu.be/l-JW4DKxwQM

https://youtu.be/c13q2wYZr_0

[Steven Lubet]

I appreciate the clips, especially Joan Baez and Billy Bragg. Warren Beatty for historical interest only; otherwise, not so much.

The Soviet Union billed itself as a "workers' paradise," which was false almost from the start. Workers were rebelling by 1921; peasants in Ukraine were driven to famine -- the Holodomor -- in the 1930s.

Warren Beatty's John Reed was an enthusiastic singer, but the Soviet Union abandoned The Internationale in 1944 (and John Reed was dead by 1920).

[Jeff Rice]

Sad that many aspects of a worker's paradise were doomed from the start and certainly any more by Stalin. One thing that left wing politics could not overcome was the hostility of Russia towards Ukrainians, Jews and others.
AS for the song, workers in all countries have a right to unionization and if only the left works towards this end, the Soviet and Chinese failures should have little influence on one's opinion about worker's rights. This extends to NU workers. As clearly, Lubet and Myself, both products of and employees in Northwestern University believe. I still say, power to the workers (but not power to the soviet).

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Pigs will fly when Posner the younger comes out in favor of unions. In any case, should anyone want to learn a bit more about unions, then and now, in this country and elsewhere, you might consult (or browse through the titles of) the third and last section (The World of Work & Organized Labor: History, Politics…) of my bibliography, Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law available on my Academia page.

Here’s a comparatively few number of titles I quickly picked out which are of a more generalized nature by way of providing an introduction to the various arguments on behalf of unions, the recent history of unions, and the possibilities for unionization and labor movements in the U.S.

• Aronowitz, Stanley. The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker’s Movement. London: Verso, 2014.
• Freeman, Richard B. and James L. Medoff. What Do Unions Do? New York: Basic Books,
1984.
• Freeman, Richard B. and Joel Rogers. What Workers Want. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
• Getman, Julius G. Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
• Greenhouse, Steven. The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
• Greenhouse, Steven. Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
• Lynd, Alice and Staughton Lynd, eds. Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2nd ed., 2012.
• McAlevey, Jane. A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.
• Moody, Kim. An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. New York: Verso, 1988.
• Moody, Kim. Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. London: Verso,
1997.
• Moody, Kim. US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failures of Reform from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below. London: Verso, 2007.
• Moody, Kim. In Solidarity: Essays on Working Class Organization in the United States. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014.
• Stepan-Norris, Judith and Maurice Zeitlin. Talking Union. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
• Quigley, Fran. If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2015.
• Yates, Michael D. Why Unions Matter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998.

[anon]

Power to the workers? Do you mean your adjuncts, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners, etc.? Sure, next, please tell us about your "power to the people" youth.

Experience has shown that the conduct of the left wing, self-appointed "junta" toward its "lessers" is always exceptionally exploitative, abusive and demanding.

Reading these folks debate about Stalin and Mao and this version and that version is delicious.

Talk about not being able to see the forest.

[A non]

Yeah, awesome. Solidarity for the union.

Accordingly, stop millions of illegals from crossing the border, deport those who are here, and stop using the bullshit idea of "sanctuary cities" in order to exploit poor uneducated brown people as cheap labor.

[Bernard Saunders]

"John Reed was dead by 1920"

They thought Joe Hill was dead, too. The organizer's spirit will never die

Here's Billy Bragg's version of the Internationale:

https://youtu.be/yAw0Ri4FSdM

Down with unequal sharing of profits; up with equal sharing of misery!

Which side are you on?