How unions help women

Status of Women Data  - Union representation brings wage setting into the open and helps ensure that employers set wages based on objective criteria, such as skill, effort, and responsibility. Research shows that labor unions tend to raise wages and improve benefits for all represented workers, especially those at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution, who are disproportionately women.

• Among full-time workers aged 16 and older, women represented by labor unions earn an average of $212, or 30.9 percent, more per week than women in nonunion jobs. Men of the same age range who are represented by unions earn, on average, $173 more per week (or 20.6 percent) than those without union representation.
• Union women experience a small gender wage gap. Women who are represented by unions earn 88.7 cents on the dollar compared with their male counterparts, a considerably higher earnings ratio than the earnings ratio between all women and men in the United States.
• Hispanic women represented by unions have median weekly earnings that are 42.1 percent higher than those without union representation. Hispanic men with union representation have earnings that are 40.6 percent higher than their nonunion counterparts.
• “Right-to-work” laws—which give employees the benefits of a union contract without paying dues—are associated with lower wages for all workers (both union and nonunion), especially women. In right to- work states, wages are about 4.4 percent lower for full-time, year-round female workers and 1.7 percent lower for full-time, year-round male workers than in non-right-to-work states