Do Unions Boost the Middle Class?

There’s a strong relationship between union membership and the size of the middle class, according to new research.

Harvard’s Richard Freeman, Wellesley College’s Eunice Han, and the Center for American Progress’s David Madland and Brendan V. Duke compared data from sources including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a decades-old report on employment, income, wealth, health, and family makeup; and the Current Population Survey, a monthly Census Bureau report on household statistics. They compared statistics from 1985 and 2011 to see how the data picture changed over a generation.

As union membership fell, so did the size of the middle class. Union membership as a proportion of the US workforce declined 8 percentage points from 1985 to 2011, to 11 percent. Meanwhile the number of middle-class households also dropped by eight percentage points, so that by 2011 the middle class comprised 46 percent of the total US population. (The researchers define middle class as people aged 25–64, earning within 50 percent of the total population’s median income.)

Union membership also appears to have positive effects that persist across generations. The data suggest that the children of union parents tend to achieve higher education levels and be healthier than their nonunion counterparts. Some advantages held especially for less-well-off families whose household heads either didn’t go to college or had a blue-collar occupation: children of union parents without college degrees earned $6,300, or 16 percent, more than those with nonunion parents, even controlling for race, education, occupation, and health.

The effects extend beyond the families of union members: the researchers find that a strong organized-labor presence in an area correlated with increased future income and well-being for children of both union and nonunion workers.

More study is needed to determine whether union membership leads to a larger middle class, the researchers say. But they argue that if the relationship proves to be causal, growing the middle class will be a challenge if the organized-labor movement continues to weaken.