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:: Sunday, December 28, 2003 ::

High-Wage America By Robert Kuttner, TAP
This Prospect special report has demonstrated that America is needlessly generating a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs, and that other paths are possible.

Unions. As several articles in this special section vividly show, unions can be forces not just for better wages and working conditions but for skills training and career paths. The resulting wage premium, often, is more than offset by the reduced turnover and increased worker productivity. The viability of unions, in turn, is the product of worker and employer attitudes, of laws protecting the right to organize, and of the competitive environment of the firm and the industry. A Las Vegas hotel can't relocate to Bangalore. Increased labor costs of paying a living wage are passed along to tourists. Organize the whole town and the unionized hotel suffers no competitive disadvantage. On the contrary, the union hotel's better trained, paid and motivated staff attracts customers. Las Vegas is thus fertile soil for organizing. Even so, the success there took extraordinary leadership, strategy and mobilization. Similar strategies have been pursued by the Service Employees International Union, whose Justice for Janitors campaign seeks to organize the entire local building-cleaning industry and then raise wages across the board.

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