Union Card Raises Wages for Women as Much as Year in College

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/12/03/union-card-raises-wages-for-women-as-much-as-year-in-college/

by James Parks, Dec 3, 2008



A new study confirms the union advantage for working women. After controlling for several factors apart from union membership (education, age, industry and state), women who belong to unions earn, on average, 11.2 percent more—about $2 an hour—than their nonunion peers. That’s equivalent to what a woman worker would gain by spending a year in college.

In addition, women in unions in 2007 “were about 19 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and about 25 percentage points more likely to have an employer-provided pension,” according to the study, Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers, by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

Union membership is important to all workers, especially women, in the current recession. Overall, women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Women workers who are covered by union contracts have equal pay protections. Millions of nonunion working women, however, must rely on today’s inadequate fair-pay laws.

That is noteworthy because women soon will make up the majority of union members. Last year, women made up 45 percent of union members. If the share of women in unions continues to grow at the same rate as it has over the past 25 years, women will be the majority of the union workforce by 2020.

Says John Schmitt, a senior economist at CEPR and author of the report:

For women, joining a union makes as much sense as going to college. All else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree.

Belonging to a union is a particularly strong boost for women working in low-wage jobs. Among women workers in the 15 lowest-paying occupations, union members earn 14 percent more than nonunion women. In the same low-wage jobs, union women are 26 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 23 percentage points more likely to have pension plans than their nonunion counterparts.

Click here to read the results of the study: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/unions_and_upward_mobility_for_women_workers_2008_12.pdf