Labor Unions and Working Class Health

An interesting study tying union membership to working class health.

When fewer people belong to unions and unions have less power, the impact goes beyond wages and job security. Those changes can hurt public health and make people more unhappy.

We’re economists who research labor and health issues. Those are two of the main findings of studies that we have conducted.

In the first study on this topic that we published in 2023, we found that increasing levels of union membership tends to make working-class people happier.

We zeroed in on a question in the General Social Survey, which the University of Chicago makes available. It asks respondents to choose whether they are “very happy,” “somewhat happy” or “not at all happy” with their life.

We found that, from 1993 to 2018, when the share of workers in counties along the borders of states with and without right-to-work laws who belong to unions rose by 1 percentage point, the average level of happiness for low-income residents moved 15% closer toward being “very happy” – a seemingly modest but noticeable change.

Right-to-work laws let workers skip paying union dues when they’re employed by a company that has negotiated a contract with a labor union. In states without right-to-work laws, those dues are mandatory. As a result, right-to-work laws weaken unions’ ability to negotiate better working conditions and reduce the share of workers who belong to unions.

But a higher rate of union membership didn’t significantly affect the happiness of higher-income people.

….

In a related working paper that we plan to publish in an upcoming edition of an academic journal, we looked into other effects of right-to-work laws. Specifically, we investigated whether, as more states adopted those laws, the gradual decline in union strength those statutes produce was contributing to an increase in opioid overdoses.

We used a research technique called the synthetic control method to assess whether declining union power has affected the number of opioid overdoses.

We drew our data from a variety of sources, including the Treatment Episode Data Set, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Multiple Cause of Death database, the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the union membership and coverage database, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illness and Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries.

We found that both fatal and nonfatal opioid overdoses increased within six years of the enactment of right-to-work laws in all four of the states we studied.

We primarily found a connection between opioid overdoses and right-to-work laws among men and male teens between ages 16 and 64 – making them of working age – with dangerous jobs, such as roofing or freight moving, and little job security. They were people who tend to feel more job stress because they don’t have control over their work tasks and schedules.

We didn’t observe those same results for women or deaths from non-opioid drugs, such as cocaine.

Lower levels of unionization are linked to weaker job security and reduced workplace protections, previous research has shown. Our work suggests these factors may play a role in increasing demand for opioids.

Once again, being pro-union isn’t some marginal question in what it means to be a good Democrat or a good liberal or however you define yourself. It’s a moral question that is equal to gay marriage and civil rights in the core values of our political identities. Or if it isn’t, we are failing ourselves and everyone else.