Labor Unions Under Neoliberalism: Part VI

The Effect of Union Density and Education on Wages by Demographic

Author

Humberto Rivas

Published

August 25, 2025

Accessing the Data

Access Table 1 of the Data Retrieval: Labor Force Statistics (CPS) (BLS 2015) page and scroll down to “Race, Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity, and Sex.” Only select the boxes for each sex in the third column, “Members of Unions: Percent Employed.” Click “Retrieve Data” and set the year range from 2003 to 2022 on the next page. Do not forget to hit “GO.” Now, you have access to the union density of each race and their corresponding sex.

Please visit Table 2 of the Data Retrieval: Labor Force Statistics (CPS) (BLS 2015) page and scroll down to “Race, Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity, and Sex.” Check the boxes in the first columns only (Total) for Men and Women. After clicking on “Retrieve Data,” change the starting and ending years to 2003 and 2022, respectively. Clicking “GO” enables you to view the nominal wages of all workers by race and sex, regardless of union affiliation. Here are the steps to adjust for inflation:

  1. Access the U.S. Census Bureau’s (2024) Current versus Constant (or Real) Dollars page and download the Excel file with the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U).

  2. Follow the BLS’ (2023) directions on Consumer Price Index: Rebasing an Index to make the CPI base year 2022.

  3. Use the first formula on the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s (Mendez-Carbajo 2023) website to calculate the real median weekly earnings.

Unlike previous visualizations, this one factors in educational attainment. Follow this link - CPS Historical Time Series Tables (U.S. Census Bureau 2023) - to download Table A-2. Once you open the Excel file, scroll down to the section titled “25 Years and Over, Completed 4 Years of College or More.” Solely observe the years 2003 to 2022 because the Asian category included Pacific Islanders before 2003. That explains why I truncated the earnings and union density data.

Visualization

Discussion

There are two bubbles for each race to represent men and women. Bubble size indicates union density for a particular race and sex. Hovering over each point will tell you the college completion rate, sex, union density, and real wages of that group. If you want to track the progress of a particular group, you can click on the legend to isolate data points. Although you cannot pause the time dimension, you may choose a certain year after the animation is done. Additionally, you can play the animation from a year that is not 2003.

Throughout Labor Union Project V, I made the following claims:

  1. Education level does not explain why non-union Asian men had sizable real wage increases compared to their unionized peers.

  2. Men had higher real wages than women in the same racial group for all 25 years, regardless of affiliation, even though women had a higher educational attainment than men (Hurst 2024).

  3. Latinos and Black Americans consistently made up the bottom half of union wage earners. Women in both groups occupied the bottom spots (7th and 8th place) every year except 2016.

  4. Black Americans earn low wages despite having the highest union density out of all races (see my Labor Union Project Part III assignment). Conversely, Asian Americans receive the highest real wages despite having the lowest union density out of all races.

Given these disparities, I created this bubble chart which includes the union densities and educational attainment of each race and sex. The animation investigates how both factors influence real wages. If we look at the second claim, Hurst’s (2024) article exclusively contains individuals with bachelor’s degrees aged 25-34 years. My data includes workers aged 25 years or older who completed four years of college or more. As you study the visualization, you’ll notice that including older workers’ educational attainments does not negate the original claim. Men of all racial groups received higher real wages than women every year, but women did not consistently have higher educational attainments.

This nuance from the bubble plot also relates to claims three and four, and reveals an incredibly odd trend. In 2003, Black men and women had very similar college completion rates. The same situation applied to Latino men and women. Nonetheless, one could argue that the men earned more because of the premiums associated with higher union density.

Crucially, major income inequality between the sexes of a specific race emerge when one is highly educated and highly unionized. White and Asian men had college completion rates 3.5% and 7.8% higher than White women and Asian women, respectively. White men had a higher union density than white women (14% vs 10.8%) while Asian women had slightly more union members than Asian men (11.9% vs 11%). Both metrics yield a $224.59 wage surplus for White men and a $264.03 wage surplus for Asian men over women workers. Although young women obtained degrees in higher numbers than young men starting in 1995 (Hurst 2024), this trend did not make the general female graduation rate surpass the male graduation rate until 2015. From this finding, we realize that the labor force had a considerable amount of older women who did not finish their undergraduate studies.

Curiously, Asian women have not been able to close the educational attainment gap with Asian men, let alone surpass them. Their Black, Latino, and White counterparts were able to do so earlier (2015 as previously mentioned). Here are the other strange parts from the bubble plot when compared to the last assignment’s bar chart:

  1. Despite Asian women having a higher graduation rate than White men throughout the period, their real wages did not surpass those of White men until 2020. If you look at the bar chart from last week, you’ll notice that unionized Asian women were paid less than unionized White men 90% of the time (18 out of the 20 years between 2003 and 2022). Non-unionized Asian women were paid less than non-unionized white men 85% of the time.
  2. The wage gap favoring Latino men over Latino women becomes larger over time, even though Latino women increasingly outpace Latino men in their college completion rates. As if that weren’t egregious enough, Latino women’s union density was within one percentage point of Latino men across time. The opposite happens with Asian women. Their union density surpasses the men, yet they are subject to the widest pay gap ever. Only Black and White women were able to decrease the wage rift with their male counterparts commensurate with their educational attainment.
  3. Among women of all races, rising college completion rates resulted in disproportionate real wage hikes. For instance, the net share of White women graduating from college jumped by 13.4% - the greatest out of all groups. Unfortunately, their net real wage for the era was $112.61. Asian women’s net college completion rates, however, climbed by 11% - the least among women. Stunningly, they saw their weekly earnings increase by $326.56 (easily the biggest gain among women).

Accounting for how educational attainment and union density affects real weekly earnings identified more distortions than initially thought. Out of the four claims mentioned, the first does have an explanation from this investigation. From 2003 to 2022, the college completion rate for Asian men 25 years old and up increased by 7.8% while union density fell by 3.4%. Hence, the comfortable earnings of non-union Asian men come from highly educated young workers. Unionized Asian men are most likely older, more experienced workers with less years of education completed. When you compare Hurst’s (2024) line chart to my bubble plot, you’ll notice that Asian men aged 25-34 years have more educational attainment than older cohorts.

Works Cited

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023, February 9). Consumer Price Index: Rebasing an index. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/rebasing.htm

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015, September 16). Table 1. Union affiliation of employed wage and salary workers by selected characteristics. https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab1.htm

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015, September 16). Table 2. Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by union affiliation and selected characteristics. https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab2.htm

Hurst, K. (2024, November 18). U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion, including in every major racial and ethnic group. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/18/us-women-are-outpacing-men-in-college-completion-including-in-every-major-racial-and-ethnic-group/

Mendez-Carbajo, D. (2023, January 3). Adjusting for Inflation. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2023/01/03/adjusting-for-inflation

U.S. Census Bureau. (2023, February 9). CPS Historical Time Series Tables - Table A-2 Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School or College, by Race, Hispanic Origin and Sex: Selected Years 1940 to 2022. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html

U.S. Census Bureau. (2024, August 29). Current versus Constant (or Real) Dollars - Annual Index Value and Annual Percent Change in Price Series: 1947 to 2023. https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/income/guidance/current-vs-constant-dollars.html