National View: Labor rules remain rigged against workers

The U.S. workforce of 156 million is the source of our economy's strength; it is America's workers who day in and day out generate the goods and services that move our country forward.

But even though these workers devote a huge part of their waking hours to the labor market, the labor market simply does not deliver for many of them. For most of the last four decades, the U.S. has suffered from rising inequality and anemic wage growth for most workers. While these trends have a number of causes, the common thread that binds them is the degradation of the bargaining power of low- and moderate-wage workers.

This suppression of workers' bargaining power has been so profound that even today's 3.9 percent unemployment rate - quite low compared to historical averages ― has not been enough to spur robust real-wage growth for most workers.

This situation of weak economic leverage for most workers is not the unfortunate-but-inevitable result of natural trends in technology and global integration. Instead, it's the product of decades of attacks on workers' leverage by policymakers, either through direct action or through a failure to keep pace with evolving employer practices that wrest leverage from workers.

The result is that the rules governing work in this country are rigged against working people from their first day on the job, leaving low- and moderate-wage workers with little bargaining power to demand their fair share of the growing economic pie.

The best guarantee for a fair workplace for workers is union representation and a collective-bargaining agreement. Strong unions improve the wages and working conditions of all working people ― both workers in unions and workers who aren't in unions ― since unions help raise standards.

Unsurprisingly, a recent poll found that 60 percent of adults have a favorable view of labor unions. However, as of 2017, only 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers were union members. This disconnect is the result of decades of fierce opposition to unions.

Policymakers should stand up for U.S. workers and act now to put policies in place to help close the gap. Policies should be enacted to ensure that workers who want to form a union are able to do so free from employer intimidation and retaliation. This would include instituting meaningful penalties against employers who illegally interfere with workers joining together to improve their wages and working conditions and prohibiting employers from requiring workers to attend meetings designed to persuade them against voting for a union.

Given that employers often cause long delays in the collective-bargaining process when workers successfully vote to form a union, policies should be enacted to help ensure that when workers join a union they are able to reach a contract successfully by creating a mandatory mediation-and-arbitration process. The law should also prohibit companies from permanently replacing striking workers, and these protections should also be extended to include workers engaged in "secondary strikes" or other protest actions in solidarity with striking workers.

In addition, policymakers should ban states from passing so-called "right-to-work" laws, which are intended to undermine the finances of private-sector unions by preventing them from being able to require that non-union bargaining-unit members - people who unions are required by law to represent - pay their fair share of the cost of that representation. Workers who want a union must be able to effectively finance the organization to ensure that they have a meaningful voice in the workplace.

These kinds of policies will help halt and reverse the trend of declining union coverage and rising inequality. These are the types of reforms that are needed to help unrig the system and ensure fairness on the job for working people.

Heidi Shierholz is policy director at the Economic Policy Institute ( epi.org ), a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. She wrote this originally for InsideSources.com .