More broadly, I disdained unions as bringing corruption, nepotism and rigid work rules to the labor market, impeding the economic growth that ultimately makes a country strong.
I was wrong.
The abuses are real. But, as unions wane in American life, it’s also increasingly clear that they were doing a lot of good in sustaining middle class life — especially the private-sector unions that are now dwindling.
Yeah, we've been trying to tell you fools this for a few decades now but thanks for finally catching on. He goes on to talk about how the decline in unions has been especially hard on construction workers who are typically male.
“To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a labor expert at the University of Washington and the author of “What Unions No Longer Do.”
Take construction workers. A full-time construction worker earns about $10,000 less per year now than in 1973, in today’s dollars, according to Rosenfeld. One reason is probably that the proportion who are unionized has fallen in that period from more than 40 percent to just 14 percent.
I don't want to include too many excerpts from the article so I urge you to take a look. Hell, he even quotes Stiglitz. It's worth it just for that and the Schadenfreude.