Exerpts from an article written by Joel Wendlad for Ploitical Affairs magazine:

Joining a labor union provides the most direct path to improving a worker’s standard of living. If done on a large enough scale, unionization could help revive the entire US economy, a chorus of voices have argued recently.

In a recent telephone conference to discuss the economic benefits of unionization with reporters last week, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, “One big reason we’re in the crisis that we’re in is that consumers have run out of money.”

Median wages dropped over the course of the past decade, making the period after the 2001 recession the first time ever that working-class wages have fallen during a an economic recovery, Reich noted.

The collapse of the housing market and the credit crunch combined with declining wages meant that working families had little or no personal financial safety net to fall back on, worsening the economic crisis to its historic proportions. “The entire economy is in trouble because there simply is not enough demand out there,” Secretary Reich said.

“If [workers] did have higher wages and higher benefits, they would have the purchasing power they need to buy more of the goods and services that this economy produces,” Reich emphasized. “And that would strengthen the economy overall.”
According to congressional Web sites, the Employee Free Choice Act aims to establish or revise three basic labor laws: 1) to give workers a choice about how to certify a union in their workplace, using either a secret ballot or a majority sign-up process; 2) increases and enforces penalties on employers who threaten or harass workers who try to join a union; 3) eliminates red tape by speeding up the process of arbitration and mediation that employers often now delay endlessly at taxpayer expense.

Union members earn an average of about 30 percent higher in wages, are 59 percent more likely to have health benefits and 54 percent more likely to have retirement benefits. Union membership also sharply reduces inequalities in wages and benefits by gender and race.
Beth Shulman, co-director of Fairness Initiative on Low-Wage Work, said that in working with low-income workers, she discovered that as workers joined unions they quickly saw higher incomes, better health care benefits and a sense of dignity and empowerment in the workplace.

“At the end of the day, having a union for millions of workers across the country really is the difference between having a decent wage and impoverishment,” Shulman pointed out. Unions also make a huge difference for communities by raising standards of livings and providing a tax base for improved public services, she added.