The weekend. Social Security. Health insurance. What do these things have in common? They all exist thanks to the advocacy of labor unions. Political economist Margaret Levi explains how these organizations forge equality and protect worker rights, calling for a 21st-century revival of the labor movement in order to build a more equitable future.This episode originally aired on May 23, 2022.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The weekend, social security, health insurance. What do these things have in common in the U.S.? They all exist thanks to the work of labor unions.
In this Archive Talk from 2021, political economist Margaret Levy explains how these organizations forge equality and protect worker rights, but that it's time to reimagine unions for today's work culture if we are to truly build towards a more equitable future.
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.
Small children toiling all day and even into the night in noisy, polluted factories. or immigrant women workers jumping from a burning sweatshop because the fire escapes were locked so that they could not take breaks. But unions changed that by winning protections for workers. They transformed lives. They enabled even the worst off to achieve the American dream.
Consider the longshore workers, those who load and unload ships. In the morning, the boss came and yelled all along the shore, thus the name Longshore. They pleaded for the scarce jobs, just as migrant day laborers do today at places like Lowe's and Home Depot. It was humiliating, degrading. But when the unions won the right to organize and won contracts, the wharf rats became lords of the dock.
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