Virtual press conference with AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler and EPI president Heidi Shierholz

Um, so hello everyone. I'm Nick Kaslarage, deputy communications director for media and editorial here at the economic policy institute where we are celebrating 40 years as the working people's think tank. Um, and on behalf of my colleagues, welcome and thank you for your time and attention this morning. Uh, a few details before we get started. Uh, we are recording this press conference and we'll post it with timestamped links and notes later today at the link I will put in the chat. After our speakers, we'll open it up for questions from the press. Please use the raise hand function and we will call on you in order. And we also have a webinar with the report authors this afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern. If you are interested, you can sign up at the link I will also put in the chat. Uh with that, I will turn it over to our moderator, uh Naomi Walker. >> Thanks so much, Nick, and good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm Naomi Walker, executive vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, and today we are releasing a very exciting new report, the case for tripling union membership. How rebuilding union power would strengthen workers, the economy, and our democracy. So, let's get started. First, we're going to hear from Heidi Shear Holtz, who is the president of the Economic Policy Institute and one of the key authors of the report, and she will walk us through the main findings. Then Liz Schuler, president of the AFL CIO, will offer her perspective on what this means for workers on the ground and then we'll open up for questions. So Heidi, I'm turning it over to you. >> Hey, thank you. Thank you Naomi. Thank you all for being here. Um, okay. EPI had long long demonstrated the benefits of unions for workers in the economy, but this report does something really different. What it does is show the absolutely transformative impact of a real restoration of union strength in this country. And I want to start with a quick word about how this fits into the broader conversation about affordability. So right now almost every conversation about affordability focuses entirely on prices as if the only way to make life more affordable is to make things cheaper. But affordability depends on both prices and pay. And if pay for typical workers had kept pace with productivity over the last 45 years, their paychecks today would be roughly 40% larger. that would take care of a lot of affordability pressures. So obviously this administration is doing things that are harming affordability by raising prices. But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that it is actually that pay shortfall that is really driving this country's affordability crisis. And there is one institution that has consistently proven capable of raising pay and that is unions. So I will first highlight four of our key findings on wages and then move on to quickly cover the broader impacts and policy. Okay. So first our analysis shows that tripling union density would raise pay for the median worker by close to 15%. That's about $7,700 every year. That would be transformative for working families and not just for union families. at 7,700 is for the median worker across the entire economy. And that is because the impact of strong unions spills over to workers at non-UN workplaces because strong unions are able to boost standards more broadly. If you look at that impact from an affordability perspective, $7,700 is more than 40% of the annual cost of a median mortgage in this country. Okay, that's the first point. Second, it's broad bunch of subpoints in there, but that was the first point. My second point is that 7,700 is not just a one-time impact. It would permanently shift the wage distribution, meaning working people would see that boost every single year. Over a 35-y year career, $7,700 a year adds up to nearly $270,000 in today's dollars. That's a lifechanging amount for a working family. It would cover nearly the cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 using USDA's numbers. Or it would more than pay for sending two children to a 4-year public college. That's two. Third, it would not just help individual families, it would transform the economy. If you add up that impact across the workforce, tripling union density would shift 1.2 trillion annually to working people. That is huge. That reverses that would reverse a full third of the rise in income inequality since 1979. And then fourth, unions raise wages for all workers, but they raise wages more for black and Hispanic workers than for white workers. We show that tripling union density would as a result close more than onethird of today's racial wage gaps. It would be an enormous force for racial equity. Okay. The benefits also go well beyond wages. Unions actually boost benefits even more than they boost wages. We show that tripling union density would cut the number of people without health insurance in this country by about a quarter. Uh strong unions also give workers a voice in shaping the fabric of their communities. High union density states invest more in public education. They deliver unemployment insurance benefits to a much greater share of jobless workers. They have all expanded Medicaid and on and on and on. So to the extent that strong unions are a driving force behind those things, tripling union density will create better outcomes on a huge array of factors. And unions protect democracy. Unions are schools of democracy. They give workers civic and leadership skills. They communicate with their members about candidates so members have the information they need when they vote. They boost voter turnout and they actively defend voting rights. We can see the results of that in the fact that in the flurry of state level voter suppression laws in recent years, states with high union density have passed far fewer bills restricting voting than low union density states. So tripling union density would be truly truly transformational. Before I get into how we get there, I want to note that 30% union density is not radical. Before decades of relentless attacks on workers rights to unions and collective bargaining, more than one in three workers in this country were union members. And workers want unions. Recent survey data show that 43% of non-UN workers would vote to unionize if they could. That's well above our goal of 30%. And Canada, whose industrial relations systems look system looks a lot like ours but provide stronger protections for unions and collective bargaining. Canada has a union membership rate of 30.6%. So restoring union density to 30% is not a fantasy. At the same time, we are very clear in the paper that there is no silver bullet for getting there. It will will require comprehensive labor law reform to truly protect workers rights to unions and collective bargaining given the decades of attacks that we've seen on those rights. So, at the federal level, those are reforms like the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. And I do want to note that those are not fringe bills. The PROACT has passed the House twice, both times with bipartisan support. One provision of the PROAC was recently pulled out, renamed the Faster Labor Contracts Act, and passed the House last month with support from every Democrat and 20 Republicans. And Josh Holly is spearheading the effort around it in the Senate. It's just there is a moment here to work alongside those really foundational bills. We also unveiled two new policy proposals in this paper that will help grow unions and collective bargaining. So the first is guaranteed annual cost of living raise for newly unionized workers whose first contracts go to arbitration. So it basically builds on the momentum of the faster labor contracts act and would allow organizers to say you vote for a union you are voting for a guaranteed race. And the second policy is default collective bargaining at any company where CEO pay is more than 100 times the pay of typical worker in their industry. So that's basically saying that if a company is that out of balance, workers should automatically have the opportunity to bargain collectively. The paper also has a comprehensive state level analysis and state level numbers, not just on the impact of raising each state's union density to 30%. But also isolating the impact of two policies that can be done at the state level. repealing so-called right to work laws and guaranteeing public sector workers the right to bargain. Those two changes alone just in the states where they are relevant would raise union density nationally from about 10% to 14.4%. So rebuilding union density would raise wages, shrink racial wage gaps, expand health coverage, strengthen communities, and protect our democracy all at the same time. There is no other policy lever that does all of that. And it is what working people want. And it is absolutely achievable. Um, and it is now my honor to turn things over to someone who is leading this fight every day, AFL CIO President Liz Scheler. >> Wow. Well, thank you so much, Heidi. Um, just want to thank you, of course, uh, for your leadership and the EPI team for this incredible report and the hard work. Um, people think the World Cup is exciting. They have not read EPI's report. Um, but I just uh want to say thank you because you've actually put the numbers behind what we at the AFL CIO and across the labor movement say all the time, right? Which is that it's better in a union and um we are uh looking forward to using this report and getting it out there as far and wide as possible. Um, so I think everyone on this call knows that we represent uh 15 million workers across 65 different unions. We represent workers all over the country in every industry across the economy. Um, but we're also the voice of working people who don't yet have a union. And I can tell you from all of my travels, I get around this country a lot. I talk to working people every day. and life in this country is just way too hard right now. Um, you know, people want to talk about quote affordability. Um, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with workers, you know, no matter where you go, big city, small town, who basically are saying over and over again, "My rent keeps going up. My paycheck does not stretch as far as it used to. I walk into the grocery store and I ask myself, when did get too expensive or so expensive? It is just a constant um you know what we're hearing from workers every single day and I think everyone on this call can appreciate that and and are experiencing it frankly. um that is what's really connecting people all across the country and it doesn't matter what party you belong to uh Democrat, Republican, independent um when people are dealing with that kind of economic pain and frustration in their lives. Um that is a an effect that is rippling out across communities. Um and people lose hope. Uh they lose hope for the future. They're losing faith in our institutions. Um they're losing faith in our political process and they're losing faith in democracy as a whole. And so we keep saying unions are what can bring people together. And unions are how we stand up as workers and say no, we are not going to accept this broken status quo. We're going to do something about it and we're going to take power into our own hands. And unions truly do have the power to transform this country. They change lives. They change the course of families. They change entire communities. Um, so just to reiterate what Heidi said, think about what a union and that extra $7,770 would do for the average working person um across a year. I mean, better healthcare, more economic security, a voice on the job, um, a retirement that you can actually count on, career opportunities for women and workers of color that have historically been on the margins. And I think that means that people do start to feel hope and they do start to feel some optimism and feel like the system isn't rigged against them. They start believing in our democracy again. And so we think and I think this report shows that, you know, there's no better way to fix what ails this country than to make it possible for more workers to join a union. Um, and so I would just say if the reporters and and media members on this call take away one thing, it's that getting to 30% density as it's laid out in the report isn't some pie in the sky idea. As Heidi said, this is not a pipe dream. We're talking about a reality that has already existed here in the United States back in the 1950s when frankly our wages were actually growing along with the economy. Um, and when economic growth meant that all of us won, not just the billionaires. And so that's what we're going to win. And that's what our goal and our vision uh in the labor movement is for this economy and for this country. Um and and look, we know the most powerful people um that are out there fighting against us are going to do that. You know, they're going to fight us every step of the way. Um we're seeing it with companies like Starbucks and Amazon and the union busting that's going on. Uh we're seeing it with our politicians who are doing their bidding in DC. um certainly from the Trump administration gutting uh collective bargaining rights of more than a million federal workers. The reason they're doing this is because they're terrified of what they're seeing right now. They're terrified of the power of people coming together collectively um and seeing the union movement grow and working people standing together and um building more power for themselves. Um, we have more unionized workers in this country than at any point in 16 years. I'm going to say that again. We have more unionized workers in this country than at any point in 16 years. We have unions winning 80% of elections in this country, which is nearly a record high. And at this moment where trust and support in our institutions is underwater and the country is so polarized again the country is polarized and there is one thing that people agree on and that is that 71% say they support unions. Check that number against anything right um that is more popular than vanilla ice cream which I think is hard to do. uh nine and 10 workers under the age of 30 support unions. So, we are going to fight for candidates that are ready to reform our broken labor laws. And these new legislative ideas that are in this report are definitely worth looking at. Um anything that we can do to help workers form a union, that is what we are going to fight for. Um but we're also not going to sit back and and wait for government to fix this. Um, we're going to be in the streets. We're going to be organizing in our workplaces and we're going to be helping workers stand up for themselves. Um, activism is what's going to feed the demand for reform and it is happening in real time. Um, so we're going to keep organizing in every workplace and every industry across this country and we will not stop until everyone can say firsthand it's better in a union. Uh so Heidi uh thank you again for this report for the work the team has done. Um I'll hand it back to you. >> Okay. Well, thank you um both Heidi and uh uh President Schuler for joining us. Um and thank you all uh from the media for everybody who joined us. Uh President Schuler and Heidi uh will both be available after this call for interviews. Uh, for President Schuler, please reach out to Mia Jacobs, uh, M. Jacobs at aflc.org. And for Heidi Sheerholds, please reach out to news epi.org or to Nick Kuzlarich. Um, and we'll put that in the chat. And again, the report is now available at epi.org. We appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much. Looking forward to talking to you more about it. All right. Thanks all.