It was good to see Joe Nocera’s column today affirming Tim Noah’s recent call for a revival of the labor movement, saying “if liberals really want to reverse income inequality, they should think seriously about rejoining labor’s side.” I would add that such a revival is necessary to rebuild the middle class and to preserve our democracy.

I’m proud that EPI has provided a lot of great research addressing the role of unions in the economy, ranging from: the impact on firms and competitiveness; the impact on the wages and benefits of union and nonunion workers; the impact on wage inequality; the flawed nature of the current process for choosing union representation; and much more. Here’s a brief guide:

• See a talk by Paul Krugman addressing the problem of income inequality, including the problem of eroded unionization. Krugman expresses some of the same sentiment as Nocera, paraphrasing “we didn’t know what we were missing until they were gone.” Pieces by Tom Kochan and Beth Shulman, and by Harley Shaiken, echo his arguments.
• Testimony by me, and another by Rutgers professor Paula Voos, articulate the importance of unions for American workers and the role unionism can play in rebuilding the middle class.
• Matt Vidal and David Kusnet provide 12 case studies from a variety of industries, including nursing, meatpacking, and janitorial, to show how unions can benefit workers and communities while making companies more productive. They also illustrate the damage inflicted when union representation is removed.
• Professor John DiNardo of the University of Michigan describes his and other research that unionization does not cause businesses to fail. Using a ‘regression discontinuity’ technique, DiNardo compares places that unionize to those that don’t and finds that differences in representation election outcomes were very similar: The near-losers are a very good “control group” for firms where the workers have just won the right to bargain collectively. DiNardo says: “This research provides evidence that this causal effect of union recognition is zero and has been zero since at least the 1960s, which is how far back we can go with the available data. In short, the biggest fear voiced by employer groups regarding unionization—that it will inevitably drive them out of business—has no evidentiary basis.”
• EPI Research and Policy Director Josh Bivens  shows why unions are not to blame for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, and that in fact, the real culprits are manipulated currency rates that make U.S.-made goods overly expensive. A dysfunctional health care system that burdens responsible employers with outsized costs, and high executive and managerial salaries, also contribute to any lack of competitiveness.
• Richard Freeman of Harvard University, perhaps the world’s leading labor market economist (I think so at least), writes that an overwhelming majority of workers say in surveys that they want a stronger collective voice on the job, and believe that a union would be good for their firm as well. Freeman’s findings “suggest that if workers were provided the union representation they desired in 2005, then the overall unionization rate would have been about 58%.”
• To get a picture of the broken process of union representation elections where employers freely intimidate workers, read Kate Bronfenbrenner’s report. Private-sector employer opposition to workers’ efforts to form unions has intensified and become more punitive than in the past. Employers are more than twice as likely to use 10 or more tactics—including threats of and actual firings—in their campaigns to thwart workers’ organizing efforts.
• Last, see the statement in support of the Employee Free Choice Act by me, along with Richard Freeman of Harvard and Frank Levy of MIT, citing the recent unprecedented growth of inequality in household income and the urgent need to give workers more bargaining power. Forty prominent economists signed the original statement, including three Nobel Prize winners, agreeing that the reform would be an overall benefit to the economy, and would provide a boost to workers when they need it most. Other economists later added their voices by signing the same statement, which resulted in close to 200 more signatories. The statement is available for download in both its original and updated versions.