Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.
That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.
And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.
“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.
Not nearly enough. We need a lot more participation. That’s gonna help with the money in politics problem too. This is the solution used the last time inequality and its socioeconomic effects were at this level, and it worked for a while.