Union Women Even Ahead of College-Educated Women In Pensions, Health Care

Women workers covered by union contracts are way ahead of non-union women workers on wages, pensions and health care, according to a new report by the Center for Economic Policy.

Unionized women without a college education are even ahead of nonunion women with college degrees on pension and health care coverage, the report said.

The report, entitled Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers, adds yet another powerful piece of evidence to the “union advantage” for working women.

Specifically, unionized women had average wages 11.2% above their nonunion sisters in jobs with similar characteristics, the report found. The difference works out to $2 an hour, and it was $2.95 for women in low-wage occupations. Wages were the only area where college-educated women had a bigger “premium” — 52.6% — over non-college educated women than union women did over non-union women with similar job characteristics.

On pensions and health care, the reverse was true: The unionized women were more likely to have both pension and health coverage than the college-educated women. “Among women workers, those in unions were about 19 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and about 25 percentage points more likely to have an employer provided pension,” the report stated.

By contrast, a woman with a college degree was 8.4% more likely to have health care coverage than a woman with similar job characteristics but only a high school diploma. And while the union woman was 24.7% more likely than her non-union sister to have a pension, the college-educated woman was only 13.1% more likely than the high-school diploma woman to have a pension.

Three-quarters of all union women had pensions and health coverage. In the 15 lowest-wage occupations, 58.7% of union women had health coverage and 58.1% had pensions or their equivalents. In those same occupations, only 26% of non-union low-wage women had health care and 20.6% had pensions or equivalents.

The report’s author, John Schmitt, also points out that in 2007, the most recent year data are available, women were 45% of all union workers. That matches their share of the overall working population. He forecast that by 2020, women will be a majority of unionized workers.

“The data suggest that even after controlling for systematic differences between union and non-union workers, union representation substantially improves the pay and benefits that women receive,” he said. “Better protection of workers’ right to unionize would have a substantial positive impact on the pay and benefits of women in the workforce.”