If a rising tide raises all boats, what does an anti-union tsunami do? Answer: everyone suffers.

If a rising tide raises all boats, what does an anti-union tsunami do? Answer: everyone suffers. The union differential is slipping, and supporting small business does not translate into supporting gainful employment. Our solution? Organize unions, press for connecting the fight for the $15 minimum wage to other work benefits and rent control and build a resistance movement and a united front to press for advances for everyone. This just in from a just-released Employment Department article:

Union-represented workers are more likely to have access to sick leave and slightly more likely to have paid holidays, but union representation doesn't seem to raise the access to paid vacation. Eighty-six percent of union-represented workers had access to sick leave in January 2016, compared with 65 percent of non-union workers. Access to paid holidays reached 79 percent of union workers and 75 percent of non-union workers. About the same share had access to paid vacation; 74 percent among union workers and 73 percent among non-union workers.

The workers with the lowest wages also have the least access to paid leave benefits through their employers. Access to paid sick leave has a direct positive relationship with earnings, with each step up in earnings quartile matched by improved access to paid sick leave. In contrast, for paid vacation and paid holidays, this relationship only holds for the shift between the lowest paid and the next quartile, with the highest half of earners having about as much access to paid vacation and paid holidays as the second 25 percent.

The size of the employer also influences the availability of paid leave benefits. This is especially true in the private sector, while public sector workers have a tighter range based on employer size. In the private sector, access to paid vacation and holidays improves as the employer size increases – workers at large employers are more likely to have access to these paid leaves than workers at smaller employers. In the public sector, there's little variation in the availability of paid vacation and holidays by size; workers at smaller government establishments are about as likely as workers at the largest government establishments to be able to enjoy these forms of paid leave.

Overall, it is access to paid sick leave that varies the most by employer size. Just over half (54%) of the workforce of the smallest employers – those with fewer than 50 employees – have access to paid sick leave, while 85 percent of workers at large employers with more than 500 workers have paid sick leave. Among the private-sector workforce, access to paid sick leave ranges from 53 percent of workers at the smallest employers to 80 percent of workers at the largest employers. Among the public-sector workforce, 74 percent of workers at the smallest employers had paid sick leave, compared with 92 percent of workers at the largest employers.

Read the entire article here.