•Press Release Unions
December 2008
Gains from union membership large, even compared to benefits of college education.
For Immediate Release: December 2, 2008
Contact: Alan Barber, 202-293-5380 x115
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) documents a large wage and benefit advantage for women workers in unions relative to their non-union counterparts.
The report, “Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers,” found that unionized women workers earned, on average, 11.2 percent more than their non-union peers. In addition, women in unions were much more likely to have health insurance benefits and a pension plan.
“For women, joining a union makes as much sense as going to college,” said John Schmitt, a Senior Economist at CEPR and the author of the study. “All else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree.”
The report , which analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), found that unionization raises the pay of women workers by almost $2.00 per hour. According to the report, women workers in unions were also 19 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, all the more significant, since women pay higher premium rates individually than men. Women workers were also 26 percentage points more likely to have an employer-provided pension plan than women workers who were not in unions.
The study also shows that unionization strongly benefited women workers in otherwise low-wage occupations. Among women workers in the 15 lowest-paying occupations, union members earned 14 percent more than those workers who were not in unions. In the same low-wage occupations, unionized women were 26 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 23 percentage points more likely to have a pension plan than their non-union counterparts.
Additional state-specific information is available from the following organizations:
Alaska
Lawrence D. Weiss Ph.D., M.S.
Executive Director
Alaska Center for Public Policy
(907) 276-2277
[email protected]
California
Susan Duerksen
Director of Communications
Center on Policy Initiatives
(619) 584-5744 x64
[email protected]
North Carolina
John Quinterno
NC Budget & Tax Center
(919) 856-3185
[email protected]
Pennsylvania
Mark A. Price, Ph.D.
Keystone Research Center
(717) 255-7181
[email protected]
