A World Without Unions
Posted at 8:45 a.m. on Feb. 1
Adam Davidson looks at the broad-based and continued decline of the private sector union and asks, “What will an America with no private-sector unions look like?”
“One thing seems fairly clear, though: where there is no collective bargaining, there is only individual bargaining. And that means each worker, sitting down with a manager, making an argument for a job or a raise or against some form of bad treatment.”
“That suggests a reversal of decades in which there was far less disparity, in which some plumbers, say, or lawyers made a huge amount while others made far less. Unions have been a brake on this version of inequality, and a unionless future suggests more inequality everywhere, even on the shop floor.”
