·
Union workers’
median weekly earnings are 28 percent higher than their nonunion counterparts.
·
While only 16
percent of nonunion workers have guaranteed pensions, fully 70 percent of union
workers do.
·
86 percent of
union workers’ jobs provide health insurance benefits, compared with only 59.5
percent of nonunion workers’ jobs. Only 2.5 percent of union workers are
uninsured, compared with 15 percent of nonunion workers.
·
Median weekly
wages for women union workers are 34 percent higher than nonunion women.
·
Median weekly
wages for African American workers in unions are 29 percent higher than for
nonunion African Americans; for Latinos, the difference is 59 percent; and for
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, it is 11 percent.
·
Fifty-three
percent of nonunion workers say they want a union in their workplace, according
to a recent national poll.
·
Ninety-two
percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to form
a union, force employee to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union
propaganda; 78 percent require supervisors to deliver anti-union messages in
one-on-one meetings with workers they oversee.
·
Seventy-five
percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on
mass psychology and distorting the law.
·
More than half
of private-sector employers tell employees they will shut down partially or
totally if the employees succeed in forming a union; in manufacturing more than
70 percent of employers tell workers this.
·
In 25 percent of
organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because
they want to form a union.
·
Even after
workers successfully form a union, nearly half of the time, employers avoid
negotiating a contract.
·
The union
movement is supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would protect
workers’ freedom to form unions by allowing them to choose a union through
majority sign-up (card-check).
·
Nearly 46
million Americans lack medical coverage.
·
Since 2000, more
than 5 million Americans under age 65 lost their health insurance.
·
Total
underinsured and uninsured in the United States: 61 million people.
·
Nearly 48
million Americans will have no health insurance for the entire year in 2005.
·
While most
Americans with health insurance rely on their employers for access to quality
care, employers increasingly are shifting health care costs to workers who
struggle to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments.
·
More than eight
in 10 of the non-elderly uninsured (83 percent) live in families where the head
of the family works.
·
Health care
spending rose 7.7 percent in 2003—following a 9.3 percent increase in 2002.
·
In 2003,
one-quarter of seniors and 37 percent of the uninsured did not fill a
prescription because of cost. Among the chronically ill, 35 percent failed to
fill a prescription, changed their dosage or cut back on basic needs because of
the high cost of prescription drugs.
·
Pharmaceutical
spending increased by 11.5 percent annually between 2002 and 2003 and another
8.3 percent between 2003 and 2004.
·
From 2000 to
2004, the amount of annual health care premium employees pay for family coverage
increased nearly 50 percent, from $1,619 to $2,412. The typical family health
insurance policy cost $9,068 per year, with employers on average paying 73
percent and employees paying 27 percent.
opeiu381, afl-cio