Monday, September 2, 2019

Quote of the Day (Nicholas Kristof, on What We Lost With the Decline of Labor Unions)


“For all their shortcomings, unions midwifed the birth of the middle class in the United States. The period of greatest union strength from the late 1940s through the 1950s was the time when economic growth was particularly robust and broadly shared. Most studies find that at least one-fifth of the rise in income inequality in the United States is attributable to the decline of labor unions.

“Unions were also a formidable political force, and it’s perhaps not a surprise that their enfeebling has been accompanied by a rise in far-right policies that subsidize the wealthy, punish the working poor and exacerbate the income gap.”— Nicholas Kristof, “Trump’s War on Workers,” The New York Times, Aug. 11, 2019

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