Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
American labor unions have collapsed. Having once bargained for more than a third of American workers, unions now represent only about 6 percent of the private sector workforce. In the wake of new statutory and constitutional limitations, their presence in the public sector is shrinking as well. As unions have declined, the United States has lost a key equalizing institution in politics and the economy, INdeed, economic inequality is at its highest point since the Gilded Age, when unionization rates were similarly low. With the weakening of unions, the United States has also lost a key mechanism for protecting against employer domination and providing workers a voice on the job. Employment law, which protects employees on an individual basis irrespective of unionization, has not filled the void.
Publication Information & Recommended Citation
Andrias, Kate. "Union Rights for All: Towards Sectoral Bargaining in the United States." In The Cambridge Handbook of U.S. Labor Law: Reviving American Labor for a 21st Century Economy, edited by Richard Bales and Charlotte Garden, 56-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.