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Infographic: Unions Are Essential for a Strong Middle Class
Article

Infographic: Unions Are Essential for a Strong Middle Class

A strong middle class needs unions in order to combat increasing inequality.

UnionsMiddleClassMay2015

Note: For research that discusses the degree to which declining unionization rates contributed to increasing inequality in the United States, see Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, “Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality,” American Sociological Review 76 (4) (2011): 513–537. For research on how unions affect inequality and redistributive government policies in other developed economies, see David Card, Thomas Lemieux, and W. Craig Riddell, “Unions and wage inequality,” Journal of Labor Research 25 (4) (2004): 519–559; Vincent A. Mahler, David K. Jesuit, and Piotr R. Paradowski, “The Political Sources of Government Redistribution in the Developed World: A Focus on the Middle Class,” presented at Inequality and the Status of the Middle Class Conference, June 28–30, 2010, available at http://www.lisdatacenter.org/conference/papers/mahler-et-al.pdf; Jonas Pontusson, David Rueda, and Christopher R. Way, “Comparative Political Economy of Wage Distribution: The Role of Partisanship and Labour Market Institutions,” British Journal of Political Science 32 (2) (2002): 281–308; Richard Freeman, “Labor Market Institutions Around the World.” Discussion Paper 844 (Centre for Economic Performance, 2008).

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the American Worker Project