Portside

Some 11% of all wage and salary workers in 2014 were in a union — down from 22% in 1983 after peaking at nearly 35% in 1954, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The fall in union membership is a significant contributor to the rise in inequality since the 1970s, says John Schmitt, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonprofit left-of-center think tank in Washington, D.C., although there’s no single cause of the economic inequality.

Globalization and technology have gutted the labor movement, and part-time work is sabotaging solidarity. Is there a new way to challenge the politics of inequality? Tackling inequality is clearly going to require more than technocratic fixes from above. It isn’t likely to succeed unless workers themselves can reclaim some bargaining power, and the sense of political and social inclusion that can go with it.

In this article Kristof acknowledges he was wrong about unions - As unions wane in American life, it’s also increasingly clear that they were doing a lot of good in sustaining middle class life — especially the private-sector unions that are now dwindling. "To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a labor expert at the University of Washington and the author of “What Unions No Longer Do.”