Margaret Levi

It's easy to imagine a world without labor unions.

We're essentially living in that world now, and we are worse off as a result.

Few of you probably belong to unions, but almost all of you benefit from them.

It was unions that brought us the weekend.

More importantly, unions built the middle class by ensuring that workers had the incomes,

to support families to buy homes and cars, and to dream that their children could do better than they could.

It was union power and advocacy that helped us win Social Security and health insurance, upon which almost all of us depend.

In the 1950s,

33% of private sector workers belong to unions.

Big labor stood proudly beside big business and big government.

No more.

Today, only 6% of private sector workers are members of unions.

With their decline in numbers came a decline in political and economic power, and the result?

A significant increase in inequality, a significant deterioration in the possibility of a middle-class lifestyle for this generation or the next, and a receding chance to own a home or afford retirement.

We need unions to regain the power so that we can regain what we have lost, build a better future, and help forge democracies that are built on a decent social contract between citizens and government and among citizens themselves.

Yes, we need unions today as much as ever.

As a professor of political science and someone who has studied labor unions for a long time, I can tell you that one of the most important things that unions do is to counterbalance the power of corporations, even the playing field.

Yes, we need unions.

But we need better and different unions that are more attuned to the 21st century.

Let's picture the world before unions.