Unionization And Working Poverty
Our guest author today is Ian Robinson, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and in the Residential College’s interdisciplinary Social Theory and Practice program at the University of Michigan.
Poverty is (by definition) a function of inadequate income relative to family or household size. Low income has two possible proximate causes: insufficient hours of employment and/or insufficient hourly wages. In 2001, there were four times more poor U.S. households in which someone had a job than there were in households in which no one did. The same is still true today. In other words, despite levels of unemployment far above post-World War Two norms, low wage jobs are by far the most important proximate cause of poverty in America today.
Perversely, despite this reality, the academic literature on U.S. poverty pays less attention to such jobs than it does to unemployment. A recent article, published in the journal American Sociological Review, both identifies and makes up for that shortcoming. In the process, its authors arrive at some striking conclusions. In particular, they find that unions are a major force for reducing poverty rates among households with at least one employed person.
Average poverty rates vary considerably among with the 50 states of this country. So do levels of unionization and other factors (e.g., the share of families headed by a single adult and the level of unemployment in the state) that figure prominently in most analyses of the deeper causes of working poverty. Thus, American federalism provides an enormous real-world experiment that we can use to assess the relative contributions of different factors affecting