This headline was so confusing to me. At first I read it like Autoworkers Strike: A Blow for Equality. And I read the article out of sheer wtf waiting for the turn that never came. But now I’m reading it correctly.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Furthermore, this apparent union victory follows on significant organized-labor wins in other industries in recent months, notably a big settlement with United Parcel Service, where the Teamsters represent more than 300,000 employees.

Most people, I suspect, believed — if they thought about it at all — that a relatively middle-class society had evolved gradually from the excesses of the Gilded Age, and that it was the natural end state of a mature market economy.

However, a revelatory 1991 paper by Claudia Goldin (who just won a richly deserved Nobel Prize) and Robert Margo showed that a relatively equal America emerged not gradually but suddenly, with an abrupt narrowing of income differentials in the 1940s — what the authors called the Great Compression.

No doubt there were multiple reasons, but surely one important factor was that the combination of war and a favorable political environment led to a huge surge in unionization.

Research by David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew shows that a rapid recovery that has brought unemployment near to a 50-year low seems to have empowered lower-wage workers, producing an “unexpected compression” in wage gaps that has eliminated around a quarter of the rise in inequality over the previous four decades.

Public approval of unions is at its highest point since 1965, and Joe Biden, in a presidential first, joined an autoworker picket line in Michigan in September to show support.

The original article contains 878 words, the summary contains 233 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Account-walled