Restoring the Freedom to Form Unions: A Long-Lasting Boost for a Faltering Economy

Amid the chatter about the worsening economy and what to do about it, a key factor has been omitted, even by progressives who ought to know better: an underlying structural cause of the current economic mess is the dismal failure of the United States to protect the fundamental human right of its workers to form unions and bargain collectively. A durable cure for the ailing economy therefore requires going beyond short-term stimulus, no matter how well crafted. The cure must include getting serious, as a nation, about protecting the most basic of workplace rights—starting with passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

What’s the connection, you may ask? After all, the aggressive corporate offensive against workers’ rights, often helped and encouraged by government policy, is by now well into its fourth decade, as are its predictable economic consequences. Those consequences include a widening gap between wages and productivity, skyrocketing profits and CEO pay, an increase in economic inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s, rising economic insecurity and stagnant or declining real wages for the vast majority of workers. Economic growth since the 1970s may have bypassed the bulk of the nation’s workers, but apart from a few significant and, in some cases, severe recessions, growth did for the most part continue. Why didn’t suppression of workers’ rights become a key structural cause of a stalled-out economy until now?