Big Labor’s lie can’t disguise the facts: Real wages are up 

Despite being afforded an array of special legal privileges that no other type of private organization enjoys, private-sector union bosses saw their membership fall by 39 percent between 1983 and 2023, even as overall private-sector payroll employment grew by 69 percent. 

Big Labor officials who bemoan their movement’s decline should look in the mirror. According to a 2023 nationwide scientific poll of workers conducted by Gallup, “six in 10 U.S. employees say they are ‘not interested at all’” in joining a union. In contrast, only 17 percent of employees say they are “highly interested” in joining.  

The current historically low level of unionization in America’s private-sector workplaces is what you’d expect, based on this lopsided opposition among workers to union affiliation. But the inside-the-D.C. Beltway leftist-funded think tank American Compass and its founder, Oren Cass, insist it’s a big problem for our nation’s employees and their pocketbooks.  

Under a “conservative” veneer, American Compass has proposed a complex overhaul of federal labor policy that aims to enhance union officials’ monopoly power over employees. It’s already received tentative backing from such Republican politicians as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.). And with notorious Teamster top boss Sean O’Brien making an appearance at the Republican National Convention last month, one might think union boss-friendly policy blueprints like American Compass’s are the true evolution of conservative labor policy. 

Not quite. As National Review Institute fellow Dominic Pino has shown, union officials in the U.S. clearly regard advancing an array of left-wing political causes, including quite a few that have little or nothing to do with the workplace, as their core function. Therefore, American Compass’s program would, if implemented, surely strengthen leftism in the U.S., even though Cass and Co. claim otherwise. 

American Compass’s executives are peddling a lie when they claim that beefing up union bosses’ government-granted powers is somehow “conservative.” But they cause even greater deception when they claim that letting workers choose freely whether to join or pay dues to a union via Right to Work laws only “undermines” the American labor system, and that the real way to create worker prosperity is to give union bosses more power to compel workers to join their ranks.  

Contrary to what Cass and other American Compass spokespersons claim, there is no credible evidence that government intervention to reverse the long-term decline in unionization would help workers economically.

As Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute showed in a paper published in May, the real compensation of a typical worker, aged 25-54, today is 32 percent higher than it was in 1973, when the share of private-sector workers who were union members was four times higher than it is today. That increase is roughly 30 times greater than the one promulgated by American Compass. 

How did Cass and Co. come up with a real pay growth number that is so far off the mark? One major problem is that American Compass arbitrarily excludes millions of employees from its calculations, including government employees of all kinds and many nonprofit employees. American Compass also excludes the roughly 20 percent of private-sector employees who are defined by the U.S. Labor Department as supervisors and nonproduction workers. It also excludes the self-employed.

Among the employees it does take into consideration, American Compass focuses only on growth in “median” pay — that is, pay for an employee at the exact midpoint of the income distribution.

Since 1973, the pay for employees in a wide array of sectors that were already relatively well compensated at that time (primarily because they were highly productive) has continued to grow faster than average due to their sustained high productivity growth. None of these real pay increases are picked up by American Compass’s self-selected gauge, however, because it downplays the gains made by workers who are above the median.

The American Compass approach to measuring employees’ earnings growth would only make sense if net productivity growth for all types of workers in all sectors of the economy were the same. But that simply isn’t the case, as Cass and his associates surely know, even if they won’t admit it. 

Of course, the fact that the sky isn’t falling for American workers doesn’t mean elected officials have removed all political obstacles to their economic security and advancement. Just for starters, Big Labor-inspired state laws that hand union bosses inordinate power over state licensing systems are arguably hindering the creation of millions of good-paying jobs for plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen. 

The current policy climate is far from ideal. But that is no reason to try to expand Big Labor’s forced-unionism power over employees and businesses, bringing back the days of Jimmy Hoffa and Walter Reuther. That’s a “compass point” leading to disaster for Americans from all walks of life. 

Stan Greer is senior research associate at the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.