Made with Excel. Making decent-looking stacked + clustered charts requires some inelegant layout operations.
Aka why corporations flood money to politicians who promise to pass right to work laws.
Most people expect the hourly base wage to be different, but look also at the difference in employer contributions to retirement and insurance. Those components of compensation make a large difference to one’s quality of life during and after ones working life.
I found it notable the union members I have known personally are all amongst the lowest earners in the group of people I have known personally.
There’s a lot of factors that skew this data…
Age, Tenure/YOE, Actual position
Unless these are fixed data sets this doesn’t show much of anything. Older generations are notoriously more pro union and are naturally at a point in their career where they make more, so for healthcare and education it would make sense. For warehousing…there is such a wide array of warehousing positions, and not all are created equal. Some are life threatening in nature…some are literally packing a box.
For the Union makes us strong 🫡🎶
I like the chart but why do unions get more benefits from ss and medicare?
I would be curious if this is controlled for by company size. Unions tend to be present at big corporations, but small businesses rarely have unions.
“dues” conveniently omitted
I like unions, but I want to know the answer to this argument against them: they raise the wage above market levels (to say $60/hr instead of $40/hr) and actually take away or withhold jobs from people people because companies cannot afford as many employees. Although those with the jobs benefit, the invisible loses are all of the people who would be employed if not for the union artificially raising the market wage. This is also the argument against minimum wage. What’s the answer to this?
Can someone explain the lack of SS&MC in the non-union
You need to add in a cut for union dues.
Some unions are great. Lots of unions are absolute garbage that just take your money and basically do nothing for you (cough cough retail unions).
I say this as someone who has been in multiple unions in my life, and currently am in one now. Lots of unions suck. Some actually do what they say they’re gonna.
Why are union dues not represented?
Health care need to unionize federally so patients get better and safer care from nurses, doctors, etc…
Moving between manufacturing facilities that were union and nonunion, I saw the unions do a terrible job negotiating.
Wages were less at several union factories the the nonunion. Different by significant amounts like $22 vs 16 to run similar equipment.
Also, the culture in the union plants was insanity. The nonunion workforce seems more content. The union workforce had something brewing at all times. Machinist vs Mechanic, mechanics vs mechanics, and union vs management. It was counterproductive often and rigid when management wanted to help someone out. They sometimes didn’t want to fire someone for attendance problems but they had to follow the contract. They still bent the contract to keep people but it was really silly to have the union use it against the management later if they helped one person in the past.
I got started in the railroad industry at a non-union railroad. After a couple of years I made the switch to a union railroad and made more money on training pay at the union railroad than I made on overtime at the non-union railroad.
Edit: union dues were less than $100/mo. More than worth it. They’ve gone up a little bit since then, but still less than $120/mo.
Look, more pro union propaganda by just your average dude, messing around in excel! Cool dude!
Underpaid vs. Overpaid. Prob should be somewhere in the middle. Especially since the non-union always works harder.
Your color choice for non-union SS is too confusing – it looks more like union insurance. Really, only the non-union wage color needs to be different and the rest of the colors could be the same as the union colors. As is it’s not as easy to compare at a quick glance.
Also, you have transportation on there twice. Warehousing and related transport may have been a way to disambiguate.
Union workers slapping on tires making 100k after benefits or dock workers making 200k for doing jobs that could have/should have been automated a decade ago.
And people wonder why everything is so god damn expensive now and/or made overseas. I’m sure you all would jump at the opportunity to have your iPhone’s cost 10x’d so they could be made in the US with good ol’ union labor.
>The iPhone maker’s facility in China’s southern technology hub was offering rates of 19 to 20 yuan (US$2.76 to US$2.90) per hour this week…
This is why Elon and all of the other billionaires hate unions
Maybe I’m a complete and total dumbass but I can’t for the live in me figure out how to join my union or how that even works if I’m already employed.
I would be curious to see a breakdown of public vs. private union. I wonder how much of these gains are being extracted from companies versus the government.
Thank you for this. It continues to astonish me that any working man or woman in this country would ever be anti-union.
Can somebody get a source for all of this. I would like to post in my classroom in North Carolina.
Edit: And I found the source a bit farther down.
I want to see similar chart about productivity.
The local union in my city is a joke, its just good ol’ boys picking who works and who dont. Its not even a union tbh, its a job placement. They get you with $57/hr, sounds great right. But on paper its more like $29/hr. Then you gotta travel to work…
The transportation segment is screwed up
I agree there should be focus on making sure employees should be compensated, but in my head these are my top 3 approaches and businesses.
3. Unions. Watch out for forced repression of technological advancement due to lack of other opportunities to retrain workers for.
2. Bars & Nightclubs (in tipping areas). You increase the gross sales by 150% and you should see a distinct loyalty and work increase from staff. If your business goes up by 150%, their tips probably are. Staff bring in cool peeps, and friends to be customers. Just all around good.
3. Profit Sharing Businesses. Similar to number 2, the harder everyone pitches in, the more profits everyone can make. The right crew self monitors and things run very smoothly. Surprised we don’t see more of this.
Everyone has different experiences, but from mine this is what I felt worked best for the workers.
Interesting all the “people” in these comments that ask where the dues are in this chart, but fall off the face of the earth when 20 comments tell them that dues are literally negligible to your gross in a union. (1-2%)
And this is why the political parties that are primarily focused on businesses and rich individuals have spent large amounts to convince their supporters that unions are evil and communist
If you’re divided in America, you’re conquered. Plain and simple. The system only responds to two forces, money and collective representation.
A similar chart that could visually show you’re still ahead after the cost of union dues would be fantastic z
Easier to show it than explain it when anti-union ads point straight at the cost of the union itself.
Would like to point out that for retail workers union workers may be getting slightly lower wages on average, but they’re also likely working full time.
If you think about what a union is, this makes sense. A union is an attempt to monopolize labor. Monopolies raise prices by restricting output. Imagine looking at the price of goods for companies that have a monopoly or are closer to one then not. You would expect to see hgher prices.
The drawback for monopolies is for the people that have to pay them and the fact that economic output is reduced from the optimal efficient level unless you can price discriminate.
One big competing force for unions is international trade which can be seen in the tighter manufacturing wages. The reason for the tight retail trade difference is that it is a low margin business that doesn’t have much to give. Grocery stores have 1% net margins as an example.
Interesting graph, but the comments are using this to circle jerk unions and that’s a bit silly honestly. Like yeah, obviously union pay is going to be higher. In industries where it isn’t, nobody would join the union and it’d instantly have no reason to even exist. We wouldn’t see those examples on a chart.
That doesn’t mean unions are automatically “good” and have no flaws. They have pros and cons. They’re pretty good for workers who have been in the union, bad for those who aren’t, and obviously costly for employers. They’re only VERY good for union bosses who collect dues. The way unions work is that pay for union workers is higher at the expense of pay for workers outside the union. This happens because non-union workers can’t get hired or paid as well due to the agreements created between unions and employers that force certain employers to only use union labor. Union leaders in these cases are essentially just restricting labor supply for employers, in turn driving up labor costs (in the form of higher pay) for union workers. When you factor in the dues that unions require though, the gap between non-union and union pay has to be large for it to even start to be worth it for the workers in the union, and the workers outside of the union are still worse off because they can’t compete with the same job supply.
People on Reddit glaze unions as a blanket pro-worker thing, but they only kinda are. They’re good for workers already in a good union, bad for workers in a shitty union that don’t negotiate well but have high dues, and bad for workers not in a union. It’s not something you can say is always pro-worker.
Monopolies have higher margins.
Given the limitations of Excel, maybe give PowerBI a try next time. You can get an individual license for free, and it works well all sorts of data sources, but it’s especially easy to work with excel data.
Show the union wages less dues and see how it compares.
![[OC] Union vs nonunion compensation in the US](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/3r9zrz5lfoyd1-1920x1024.jpeg)
39 comments
From the US Dept of Labor, [Bureau of Labor Statistics. June 2024](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.t05.htm) [Economic News Release](https://www.bls.gov/bls/newsrels.htm) [Employer Costs for Employee Compensation](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.toc.htm)
Made with Excel. Making decent-looking stacked + clustered charts requires some inelegant layout operations.
Aka why corporations flood money to politicians who promise to pass right to work laws.
Most people expect the hourly base wage to be different, but look also at the difference in employer contributions to retirement and insurance. Those components of compensation make a large difference to one’s quality of life during and after ones working life.
I found it notable the union members I have known personally are all amongst the lowest earners in the group of people I have known personally.
There’s a lot of factors that skew this data…
Age, Tenure/YOE, Actual position
Unless these are fixed data sets this doesn’t show much of anything. Older generations are notoriously more pro union and are naturally at a point in their career where they make more, so for healthcare and education it would make sense. For warehousing…there is such a wide array of warehousing positions, and not all are created equal. Some are life threatening in nature…some are literally packing a box.
For the Union makes us strong 🫡🎶
I like the chart but why do unions get more benefits from ss and medicare?
I would be curious if this is controlled for by company size. Unions tend to be present at big corporations, but small businesses rarely have unions.
“dues” conveniently omitted
I like unions, but I want to know the answer to this argument against them: they raise the wage above market levels (to say $60/hr instead of $40/hr) and actually take away or withhold jobs from people people because companies cannot afford as many employees. Although those with the jobs benefit, the invisible loses are all of the people who would be employed if not for the union artificially raising the market wage. This is also the argument against minimum wage. What’s the answer to this?
Can someone explain the lack of SS&MC in the non-union
You need to add in a cut for union dues.
Some unions are great. Lots of unions are absolute garbage that just take your money and basically do nothing for you (cough cough retail unions).
I say this as someone who has been in multiple unions in my life, and currently am in one now. Lots of unions suck. Some actually do what they say they’re gonna.
Why are union dues not represented?
Health care need to unionize federally so patients get better and safer care from nurses, doctors, etc…
Moving between manufacturing facilities that were union and nonunion, I saw the unions do a terrible job negotiating.
Wages were less at several union factories the the nonunion. Different by significant amounts like $22 vs 16 to run similar equipment.
Also, the culture in the union plants was insanity. The nonunion workforce seems more content. The union workforce had something brewing at all times. Machinist vs Mechanic, mechanics vs mechanics, and union vs management. It was counterproductive often and rigid when management wanted to help someone out. They sometimes didn’t want to fire someone for attendance problems but they had to follow the contract. They still bent the contract to keep people but it was really silly to have the union use it against the management later if they helped one person in the past.
I got started in the railroad industry at a non-union railroad. After a couple of years I made the switch to a union railroad and made more money on training pay at the union railroad than I made on overtime at the non-union railroad.
Edit: union dues were less than $100/mo. More than worth it. They’ve gone up a little bit since then, but still less than $120/mo.
Look, more pro union propaganda by just your average dude, messing around in excel! Cool dude!
Underpaid vs. Overpaid. Prob should be somewhere in the middle. Especially since the non-union always works harder.
Your color choice for non-union SS is too confusing – it looks more like union insurance. Really, only the non-union wage color needs to be different and the rest of the colors could be the same as the union colors. As is it’s not as easy to compare at a quick glance.
Also, you have transportation on there twice. Warehousing and related transport may have been a way to disambiguate.
Union workers slapping on tires making 100k after benefits or dock workers making 200k for doing jobs that could have/should have been automated a decade ago.
And people wonder why everything is so god damn expensive now and/or made overseas. I’m sure you all would jump at the opportunity to have your iPhone’s cost 10x’d so they could be made in the US with good ol’ union labor.
>The iPhone maker’s facility in China’s southern technology hub was offering rates of 19 to 20 yuan (US$2.76 to US$2.90) per hour this week…
This is why Elon and all of the other billionaires hate unions
Maybe I’m a complete and total dumbass but I can’t for the live in me figure out how to join my union or how that even works if I’m already employed.
I would be curious to see a breakdown of public vs. private union. I wonder how much of these gains are being extracted from companies versus the government.
Thank you for this. It continues to astonish me that any working man or woman in this country would ever be anti-union.
Can somebody get a source for all of this. I would like to post in my classroom in North Carolina.
Edit: And I found the source a bit farther down.
I want to see similar chart about productivity.
The local union in my city is a joke, its just good ol’ boys picking who works and who dont. Its not even a union tbh, its a job placement. They get you with $57/hr, sounds great right. But on paper its more like $29/hr. Then you gotta travel to work…
The transportation segment is screwed up
I agree there should be focus on making sure employees should be compensated, but in my head these are my top 3 approaches and businesses.
3. Unions. Watch out for forced repression of technological advancement due to lack of other opportunities to retrain workers for.
2. Bars & Nightclubs (in tipping areas). You increase the gross sales by 150% and you should see a distinct loyalty and work increase from staff. If your business goes up by 150%, their tips probably are. Staff bring in cool peeps, and friends to be customers. Just all around good.
3. Profit Sharing Businesses. Similar to number 2, the harder everyone pitches in, the more profits everyone can make. The right crew self monitors and things run very smoothly. Surprised we don’t see more of this.
Everyone has different experiences, but from mine this is what I felt worked best for the workers.
Interesting all the “people” in these comments that ask where the dues are in this chart, but fall off the face of the earth when 20 comments tell them that dues are literally negligible to your gross in a union. (1-2%)
And this is why the political parties that are primarily focused on businesses and rich individuals have spent large amounts to convince their supporters that unions are evil and communist
If you’re divided in America, you’re conquered. Plain and simple. The system only responds to two forces, money and collective representation.
A similar chart that could visually show you’re still ahead after the cost of union dues would be fantastic z
Easier to show it than explain it when anti-union ads point straight at the cost of the union itself.
Would like to point out that for retail workers union workers may be getting slightly lower wages on average, but they’re also likely working full time.
If you think about what a union is, this makes sense. A union is an attempt to monopolize labor. Monopolies raise prices by restricting output. Imagine looking at the price of goods for companies that have a monopoly or are closer to one then not. You would expect to see hgher prices.
The drawback for monopolies is for the people that have to pay them and the fact that economic output is reduced from the optimal efficient level unless you can price discriminate.
One big competing force for unions is international trade which can be seen in the tighter manufacturing wages. The reason for the tight retail trade difference is that it is a low margin business that doesn’t have much to give. Grocery stores have 1% net margins as an example.
Interesting graph, but the comments are using this to circle jerk unions and that’s a bit silly honestly. Like yeah, obviously union pay is going to be higher. In industries where it isn’t, nobody would join the union and it’d instantly have no reason to even exist. We wouldn’t see those examples on a chart.
That doesn’t mean unions are automatically “good” and have no flaws. They have pros and cons. They’re pretty good for workers who have been in the union, bad for those who aren’t, and obviously costly for employers. They’re only VERY good for union bosses who collect dues. The way unions work is that pay for union workers is higher at the expense of pay for workers outside the union. This happens because non-union workers can’t get hired or paid as well due to the agreements created between unions and employers that force certain employers to only use union labor. Union leaders in these cases are essentially just restricting labor supply for employers, in turn driving up labor costs (in the form of higher pay) for union workers. When you factor in the dues that unions require though, the gap between non-union and union pay has to be large for it to even start to be worth it for the workers in the union, and the workers outside of the union are still worse off because they can’t compete with the same job supply.
People on Reddit glaze unions as a blanket pro-worker thing, but they only kinda are. They’re good for workers already in a good union, bad for workers in a shitty union that don’t negotiate well but have high dues, and bad for workers not in a union. It’s not something you can say is always pro-worker.
Monopolies have higher margins.
Given the limitations of Excel, maybe give PowerBI a try next time. You can get an individual license for free, and it works well all sorts of data sources, but it’s especially easy to work with excel data.
Show the union wages less dues and see how it compares.
Comments are closed.