[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 44 (Tuesday, March 9, 2021)]
[House]
[Page H1127]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               UNIONS WILL HELP REBUILD THE MIDDLE CLASS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Levin) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LEVIN of Michigan. Madam Speaker, later today we will debate the 
PRO Act, and we will pass the PRO Act to free up American workers to 
form unions and bargain collectively just because they darn well please 
without interference from their employer. And when we debate the PRO 
Act, Madam Speaker, we will get into all the details of the provisions 
of the PRO Act, which are really incredible, and I am very excited 
about that.
  But right now, I want to talk about what a difference the PRO Act 
would make, why it would be a game changer for the working people of 
this country.
  First of all, let's talk about productivity. American workers are 
incredibly productive. In the whole period during and after World War 
II when Americans were forming unions, thanks to the National Labor 
Relations Act, and up to a third of private-sector workers were in 
unions, wages and productivity rose in lockstep. You can't even 
separate them.
  But then in the late seventies when we started deregulating airlines 
and deregulating trucking, and when Ronald Reagan became President and 
busted the air traffic controllers union, PATCO, and the union-busting 
business came up, and union membership started declining, productivity 
kept zooming up, but workers' compensation was totally flat. Since 
1979, productivity has increased 70 percent, but compensation only 12 
percent.

  What about income inequality? We can go to the next one. For the last 
100 years, income inequality has tracked union membership almost 
exactly. So if you take the share of income taken by the top 10 percent 
of the workforce, you can see that as union membership grew, income 
inequality fell.
  Look at the difference the National Labor Relations Act itself made. 
In 1935, union membership shot up. The wages of the top 10 percent shot 
down as a share of everybody. We got more equal. We achieved the 
American Dream. And now with 1,000 cuts to union membership, when we 
are down to 6 percent of private-sector workers being in unions, there 
has been this incredible divergence, and the wealthy have taken all of 
the gains, and workers aren't in unions anymore.
  And let's look at some specific stuff as we get the next slide up 
here. Let's start with benefits. Union members have more benefits and 
better benefits almost across the board. Here are just a couple of 
examples: 86 percent of union members have access to paid sick leave, 
as opposed to 72 percent of nonunion workers; and 94 percent of union 
members have access to healthcare benefits, compared to just two-thirds 
of nonunion workers.
  And it is not on this slide, but more than half of union members have 
access to defined benefit pensions, real pensions, and only a small 
fraction of nonunion workers do.
  Finally, let's look at wages in the next one. For all workers across 
the private sector, union members make about $1,150 a week more.
  We are here debating, and finally we are passing, $1,400 for poor 
families one time. Union members earn $1,150 more every week through 
their own labor because they negotiated for it. That is $7,800 a year 
more.
  And finally, if we look at the next slide--and Rick is doing an 
awesome job here; I appreciate you--it is especially important for 
women and workers of color. Look at this: This shows that across all 
categories of American workers, White, Black, and Latinx men and women 
workers make more. Women make $11,752 a year more if they are union 
members than if they are not. African-American workers make $10,088 a 
year more if they are union members. And Latinx workers make almost 
$14,000 a year more, $13,936.
  Madam Speaker, any way you slice it, when we give workers the power 
to form unions at their workplace, they lift themselves up, they lift 
up their families, they lift up all the nonunion workers around them 
because the nonunion employers have to raise wages to keep up with the 
unionized workers, and they lift up our country.
  Let's pass the PRO Act and rebuild the middle class of this country.

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