Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.
That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.
And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.
“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.
Now imagine if we had some way to send people that could represent our needs to the government. If only we could house such a group of people near the seat of government so that they could petition our needs in the form of … I don’t know let’s call it a bill of writ and law.
If only we could have something like that, too.