This Complicated Union Chart Shows Almost Everything
Understanding what’s going on with unions, productivity and inequality in one cool chart!
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is an essential source for labor and union related data, analysis and commentary. It’s known for presenting a few fascinating charts, including a comparison below, of the union membership rate (the percentage of all workers who are union members) and the share of all income that goes to the top 10% of wage earners. This shows the familiar rise and fall of union membership over the last century and an apparent inverse relationship with the high income share — as union membership goes up/down, the income share to the top 10% goes down/up.
Another interesting comparison, below, is between the increases in the net productivity of the economy and total compensation (wages and benefits) of private sector nonsupervisory workers. This shows that labor compensation increased with productivity in the post-WW2 era until the late 1970s, but since then has grown much more slowly than productivity.
I’ve always thought that it would be great to combine all this data, and as far as I know, EPI hasn’t presented that kind of chart…
