Comments Elsewhere

Robert,

O.K., but I don’t think that that very well explains the decline in union membership and union influence over the past 30 years. Average real wages are substantially lower now than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s, and despite several years of modest increases during the late 1990s, the steady trend since 1973 has been the erosion of workers’ wealth, not an increase in the baseline.