Making our economy work better for everyone

On Tuesday, representatives of 6 million working Americans will join together in St. Louis to launch an ambitious new campaign to make our economy work better for everyone.

This group of seven major unions, called the "Change to Win Coalition," decided to leave the national AFL-CIO earlier this summer to find new ways to ensure that hard work is again rewarded in America.

We know that how and where Americans work — and how we are paid for that work — have been changing for several decades. The shift from good-paying jobs with secure health-care and retirement benefits to lower-wage jobs with sharply reduced benefits (if any) has created broadly negative consequences. The growing gap between the wealthiest Americans and typical wage earners is one obvious outcome.

Sadly, that disparity has been on display during the appalling disaster in New Orleans. Some people had transportation and extra cash to evacuate. But many thousands — including many who worked in New Orleans' low-wage tourism economy — did not have the funds to get out.

Many Americans are watching our communities change into low-wage economies. Here in Washington, the state Employment Security Department reports that four of the six "hottest" jobs outside of technology are low-wage service jobs — cleaners, child-care workers, security guards and hairdressers.

Working people have joined together before to change jobs for the better. We believe we can do it again. One important example is the side-by-side rise of Boeing and the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA).

In the mid-1930s, most industrial workers, including those in Washington's emerging airplane industry, earned low wages and had few benefits. Owning a home or sending children to college was out of reach for most working families. But that changed dramatically, due in large part to the growth of unions like the Machinists. As the percentage of union members in the work force peaked between 1940 and 1962 (it reached its high point of 35 percent in 1955), the average wage of a machinist rose nearly 300 percent, from 80 cents to $3.10 an hour. Boeing workers and other union workers achieved retirement and health benefits for the first time.

What those union members won became standard for many other workers: from nurses to grocery workers, both union and nonunion. A large middle class emerged in Seattle, creating many of the neighborhoods we know today.

But the industrial base and union membership both began to rapidly decline in the 1970s and 1980s. The Machinists' membership has dropped 40 percent since its peak. As the service sector expands, the average hourly-wage job now has less buying power than it did in the early 1970s, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Two of the most important worker benefits, health insurance and pensions, are under attack for both union and nonunion workers. Machinists at Boeing are now on strike to improve their retirement security and access to health care. Nurses and hospital workers at Swedish Medical Center are also taking a stand for retirement and health care.

But the growing number of workers who aren't in unions don't have a say about cutbacks. In 2004, nearly one in three companies in this state didn't offer health insurance at all. Many offered plans that workers couldn't afford. More than six out of 10 didn't offer a retirement plan, according to a survey by the Employment Security Department.

The seven "Change to Win" unions have committed to work together to help millions more workers in today's economy join the union movement and raise living standards for everyone. The "Change" unions — the Teamsters, UNITE HERE (clothing and hotel workers), United Food and Commercial Workers, Laborers' Union, United Brotherhood of Carpenters, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and United Farm Workers — will use the kind of new strategies that SEIU used to unite more than 900,000 more workers in the past nine years.

Today, as in generations past, working Washingtonians want a state where work is rewarded and everyone has access to affordable health care, secure retirement, education, housing and transportation. It's up to today's unions to change to achieve that dream.