Happy International Women's Day!
First came the wave of teacher strikes led by women fighting the devaluing of their work, then Google employees walked out in protest of its handling of sexual harassment and (later) formed the Alphabet Workers Union, and now racial justice is a central theme as Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama vote on whether to unionize. In between have been innumerable other actions of protest, solidarity, and collective action spurred by concerns with racial justice, the she-cession and other pandemic-induced inequalities, and feelings of powerlessness.
Despite numerous
obstacles, this newfound energy could lead to increased unionization. The
prospects of a resurgence in labor unions would be dramatically magnified if
Congress passes the Protecting the Right to
Organize (PRO) Act. The PRO Act brings together pieces of failed legislation over
the past three decades and would drastically re-shape labor
law by removing numerous employer
advantages over
unions and workers, making it easier for workers to form unions and giving them
greater bargaining power. Greater unionization could result in important
benefits for working women. Here’s why.
Boosting Women’s Pay
Perhaps the most
obvious thing that unions typically do is negotiate for higher pay and better benefits. Recent research
indicates that, on average, unionized women earn 12 percent more than similar nonunion women in the U.S. private
sector. Unionization appears to increase pay for white women and Black women to a similar degree. So if more women become unionized, we’d expect their
pay, on average, to increase. The union wage premium for women could even conceivably
increase with the passage of the PRO Act because of its potential to increase
union power. There could also be spillover effects that increase the
pay of other working women because the threat of unionization can cause
employers to preemptively increase pay.
Some things that
labor unions commonly do—such as raise pay more aggressively among lower-paid
workers, negotiate standardized pay rates and strong grievance procedures, and
combat pay secrecy—could also close the gender pay gap. Indeed, when
Wisconsin weakened teacher unions and allowed greater individual wage-setting,
the gender pay gap increased. But systematically
closing the gender pay gap requires greater intentionality among unions because
men have a higher union pay advantage than women in the
U.S. private sector, so increased unionization could benefit men even more than
women without a more explicit focus on the gender pay gap.
Benefits Workers Can
Use
Union contracts
typically address wide-ranging issues relating to benefits, scheduling, and
time off which are beneficial for individual and
community well-being. Many of these can be particularly beneficial for
working mothers trying to juggle multiple roles, though research paints a mixed picture
with union members more likely to have stable hours but also more likely to
have nonstandard schedules. Research
from the UK highlights three ways in which unions help workers balance work
and family: bargaining
for policies that directly help working mothers, such as paid parental leave,
job sharing or onsite child care; reducing the frequency of excessively long
working hours, and fighting the typical manager’s belief that balancing work
and family is solely the worker’s responsibility.
But bargaining
for policies is not enough; workers need to be able to actually use them. This
dynamic is captured by the four A’s:
availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance. In other words, for a
new mother, for example, to take paid parental leave: 1) the policy needs to be
available, 2) if available, the worker needs to be aware of it, 3) even if
aware of an existing policy, the worker needs to believe she can afford a
leave, and 4) even if affordable, the worker needs to have assurances against
negative consequences that might result from taking a leave (e.g., missing out
on a promotion).
So beyond negotiating
for better policies (availability), unions can also significantly help women
use these policies—they can help spread awareness through newsletters,
one-to-one interactions, and the like; make leaves more affordable through
higher wages and better insurance coverage; and combat reprisals through
bargaining, grievance procedures, and other means. In my own research, I label
this the “facilitation
effect” of labor unions. Through these various channels, union-represented new
mothers are more than 15 percent more likely to
use paid maternity leave than are comparable non-union mothers.
This
facilitation role of labor unions can also help working women navigate the
complex maze of federal, state, and local public policies on work. For example,
in the first years after the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act
(FMLA), hourly
unionized workers were much more likely than others to have heard about the
FMLA, and were significantly less worried about losing their seniority or their
job if taking a family or medical leave. Eligible workers are more likely to receive unemployment insurance benefits if they
were in union jobs, and unions help enforce workplace safety and reduce other labor rights violations. This
assistance is likely particularly important for marginalized workers who
otherwise don’t have the resources and connections to counter employer
transgressions.
Ripple Effects on the Policy Environment
Unions also lobby
for legislative protections for workers. The labor movement supports the $15
minimum wage that was controversially excluded from the federal stimulus bill last week.
An increase in the federal minimum wage would particularly benefit women, workers of color, and especially women of color (though these workers are also disproportionately excluded from coverage). Passage
of the PRO Act could further boost union influence that results in more favorable public policies for workers and working women. Right-to-work laws that allow union-represented workers to not
pay union dues or fees weaken unions financially and politically, resulting in more conservative lawmakers and lawmaking. The PRO Act would
abolish right-to-work laws, perhaps prompting the reverse cycle.
At an individual
level, labor unions help equip members with advocacy skills and norms that
translate into greater political and civic engagement. If more women are
represented by unions in the future, these empowerment skills and norms could
potentially translate to other areas of their lives, too, such as running for political office or negotiating the
allocation of household responsibilities.
Putting the PRO Act in Context
A resurgence in
labor unions, perhaps supported by the PRO Act, could have important benefits
for working women—but there are multiple qualifications. What happens in any
particular bargaining unit can reflect contested political dynamics that are
not guaranteed to prioritize the concerns of working women or of workers with
other identities. Also, even if the PRO Act is enacted, increased unionized
would still require workers to successfully organize.
Additionally, the
PRO Act would only apply to the private sector, where less than 6 percent of
women are unionized; 60 percent of women union members work in the public
sector, where most are subject to state-level regulation which is often
unfavorable in conservative states. The PRO Act also fails to address labor law’s racist and sexist roots
that excluded agricultural and domestic service workers from its protections.
As good as the PRO Act might be for some women workers, it’s only one piece of a broader set of policy interventions and new norms that we need to fully respect the dignity of labor.
Originally published in the Gender Policy Report.
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