ABSTRACT
US unions consistently identify raising wages as a central demand of the movement. The last decade is no exception. The recent AFL-CIO slogan, ‘America Needs a Raise’, and President Sweeney’s book of the same title are indicative of the Federation’s priorities (Sweeney 1996). Indeed, some pundits claim that the US labour movement is doing more than any other institution to return questions of economic inequality to the forefront of liberal and progressive reform in the US (Meyerson 2000). The need is pressing since class and race income disparities have widened in the US since the early 1970s. Real wages inched forward in the late 1990s, after declining since 1973, but the rise in overall wealth of the top fifth of the population far outpaced the gains for the bottom two-fifths. In particular, African-Americans saw their income and wealth erode in relation to EuroAmericans (Levy 1998).
