So Dan, before we get started today, we just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know about something new from Bloomberg. Do you want to hear what it is? Go for it? Well. Starting now, you can actually use our Io s app or Bloomberg's Google Chrome extension to scan any news story on any website, instantly revealing relevant news and market data from Bloomberg and other sources related to the companies and the people you're reading about. So really, no matter where you're reading the news, you can bring the power of Bloomberg's news and data with you. It's pretty amazing. Download our Io s app or search for the Bloomberg extension on the Chrome Store to try it out. Learn more at bloomberg dot com. Backslash lanes. Just about every indicator of the US labor market shows that jobs are plentiful and we're pushing the limits of how many people can be employed. But many Americans still aren't seeing the kind of lift to their wallets that were used to with these kinds of numbers in the labor market. One possible explanation is that Americans are not organized in labor unions like they used to be. While unions have had some notable successes, like this year's deal by Hollywood writers that averted a strike, or the victory by forty thou unionized Verizon workers last year. Most American workers lack the bargaining power that they had throughout much of the twenty century. Today on Benchmark, we're speaking with an expert on this subject, Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden. I'm Scott Landman and economics editor for Bloomberg News in Washington. Joining me as a guest co host today is Patricia Leiah, a reporter covering the U. S economy, also here in d C. Patty, thanks for being here, h I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so. Patty, You've just covered the latest US employment report that came out last Friday. What stood out to you in that report? Yeah, so the headline number for April was pretty good, especially after a disappointing March that was partly caused by that snowstorm we saw that affected most of the northeast Stella. But even as the main headline number came above, estimates, on the jobless rate fell, which growth was still a bit disappointing. It's just not at the level where it used to be in previous recoveries, right, and that's been a puzzle for a while. Now the labor market is getting tighter and tighter, but we're just not seeing the kind of three percent four percent pay gains that had happened in previous expansions when we had a tight labor market that kind of looked like this. So for more on this now, let's bring in Jared Bernstein, since he has been a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and before working in the Obama administration, he was at the Economic Policy Institute and was also Deputy Chief Economist at the Labor to Artment during the Clinton years. He's also a pretty good basketball player, as I found out some years ago. Jared joins us by phone from his office in Washington. Now, Jared, thanks for spending time with us on Benchmark. My pleasure, though I have to say my teammates last night would not describe me as a pretty good basketball player. But at any rate, I'm I'm better at the labor market stuff. I guess, well we'll focus on that today. Good. So, there there are lots of things, Jared that are different about having a job in America today compared with forty or fifty years ago. Was it really better back then? Or are we looking through rose colored glasses at the past. Well, in terms of the connection between wages and the job market, things were better for various groups of workers, not everybody. In fact, if you look at the gender wage differential, women were earning a lot less than men for comparable, comparable work back then than they are now. There was still discrimination in the job market in other ways as well. But if you're simply talking about basically two things, the tightness in the labor market and the way that tightness mapped onto people's paychecks, Yeah, that was that was better back then. So let me give you a pretty mind blowing statistic on this. Uh it used to be the case, I was Patty was saying, at least by some metrics, the current job market might be described as being at full employment. I'm not sure I quite see it, but that's a certainly a legitimate thing to declare. Well, since nineteen eighty, we've been at full employment less than thirty percent of the time. Before eight, say, the late forties to nineteen eighty, we were at full employment almost seventy percent of the time, so we were much more likely to have a tight labor market, and a tight labor market delivers some bargaining cloud to uh middle and lower rage workers. Of course, as you kind of mentioned in your intro, we were more unionized back then as well, so economic growth mapped onto the paychecks of middle wage workers more uh robustly then than it does now. Let me share some facts with our listeners from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The union membership rate was at ten point seven percent in it was over three and even the state with the highest union membership, New York, is at uh just under the lowest of South Carolina at one point six When when you think about the economy being at full employment, how how has that particular change affected the American worker? Are people not organized in unions to be able to take advantage of a full employment situation like they used to be? Well, I guess the way I look at it is a little bit differently, and the the in American style job markets, you know, we have a kind of a more rigorous version of capitalism than they do in in other more social democracies. Uh, your paycheck is not just a function of how skilled, you are, your value added. That's kind of what they teach you an economics class. But that's part of it, no question. But it's also a matter of your bargaining power, your bargaining clout. And historically there have been two factors that have contributed to the bargaining clout of middle and lower wage workers, or at least two factors. One is very tight labor market and f I mentioned earlier, that's been very much the exception, not the rule, over the last few decades, um and And the other is unionization. And your numbers are correct, I would simply um add to them that in the private sector, which is where most people work, uh, the unionization rate is only seven percent. So that's that's you know, getting a way below not only where it used to be, but where it is in in other advanced economies. There are some other factors that help determine wages at the level of the minimum way age, to the extent to which labor standards are enforced, the structure of employment. You've got the gig work that can sometimes play out in paychecks and ways that are negative for workers. But if you put it all together, the factors that used to give workers, more bargaining power, tight labor markets, high unionization rates, rigorously enforced labor standards. Many of those are things of the past. Right, you think that would be pretty good to be in an union. If you're a worker at a D and T, you have a pension, you have ritary health benefits, you probably have a bunch of other parts that people in the rest of corporate America gave up a long time ago. Right, Well, yes, there are definitely some unions that are still able to deliver that those kinds of benefits to their members. Um. Public sector unions often do a pretty good job, which is one reason why they're under siege and many states throughout the throughout the nation. Uh. And if you compare union workers to non union workers just based on their wages, controlling for everything else, there's still a significant premium there somewhere, I guess between ten and fiftent at least. But an interesting finding that that's germained to our conversation is that when unionization rates get higher, so right now they're about as you said here, but back when they're or if you go over to Europe and you see uh, union rates that are considerably higher than that you end up with a lot more pattern bargaining or collective bargaining where union wages enforced the pay of workers outside the union sector. So there's a spill over there that can happen as well. And you certainly don't see that when you're down to the kind of levels of of collective bargaining that we have our nations with that still have higher union membership rates experiencing faster wage growth than the United States has been with declining union membership, or has it been fairly consistent worldwide? Well, I think on average you wouldn't really find that UM, But I think if you look distributionally, their their wage distributions tend to be UM tighter, less dispersed than ours, They have less wage inequality, less less earnings dispersion UM, and in fact, in many cases, as their unionization rates go down, they end up with more of that UM. An important early study found that about a fifth of the increase in in wage dispersion, at least among men, was attributed to the decline in unionization. Now fifth may not sound like a ton, but that was the largest factor that I think anyone's ever uncovered in that in that research. Is it harder to organize labor unions these days, or oh yes, yeah, is there more apathy among workers or what is it? Well, I don't know that there's more apathy among workers. And in fact, if you pull people depending on the question, you know, these surveys can be a little squirrelly. Many people will say something to the effect of, we recognize that we need some form of an organization to push back on UM the kinds of things that our employers are trying to do to us. Now. They might not like the word union, but that's a pretty consistent finding. I think what's really different now is that there is a depocketed, multi billion dollar union avoidance industry, and you know, you'll see stores like Walmart closed down a franchise somewhere if they're worried that it's going to become unionized. So the UH, the anti union initiatives taken by UM employers, not not all, by the way, but those who are particularly averse to UH to union membership UM have gotten a lot more aggressive. I do think that workers probably think differently about unions than they used to. I know there was a case pretty recently, I think it was Volkswagen in maybe Tennessee, where the workers voted not to form a bargaining unit unit. And I wonder if some of what was going on there was a sense that the you know, the union wasn't going to really help them all that much. Let's drill down a little bit further into some of the wage data you have. By all indicators a tight labor market. The retail sector is a major is a fairly significant part of our employment. I think it's around fourteen fifteen million people are employed in retail. Uh, they're fairly low paid. UH. Maybe the wage gains, at least in some of the recent data have been have been pretty flat. Would could would they be potentially faster if there was more union organization in that sector or do you think there are other forces at play? I think that you'll find union wages are higher, as I mentioned earlier, that there's a premium there. Whether they're growing faster or not. UM, that's probably a tougher call. I don't I don't know that I've seen so much of that in the data. So probably more of a level story than a growth story. I think, you know, economists are scratching our heads over the the what we call the flatness of the Phillips curve, which is just a fancy way of saying the breakdown and the correlation between tight labor markets and price growth and wage growth. Uh, whether you're looking at prices or wages, you might expect there to be more uh growth when you're you're down at an unemployment rate that's four point four percent. But there are many explanations for that, by the way. One is that the federal reserves, at least in terms of inflation or prices, has kind of locked in everybody's heads that are going to target two percent no matter what, so inflation is really quote well anchored. Another is, of course, the bargaining power story that I've I've been talking about we've been discussing throughout our our conversation. Uh and UH. Another is the bargaining power discussion that we've been having uh throughout our conversation. UH. And then there is kind of a sectual story, as you were suggesting, UM, there are sectors in our economy that are facing a set of pressures they didn't face fourty or fifty years ago. For instance, our manufacturers are in much more of a global competitive situation than they were back in those days of you know, literally two and three percent unemployment rates if you go back to the nineteen sixties. UM and so, uh what what While globalization has many upsides, no question, particularly in terms of the supply of resources, liquid supply chains and all that, UM, for many workers, blue collar workers, production workers, workers and manufacturing, that kind of wage competition has hurt them. M. That's become a very politically salient effect in recent years. Need I say, Jared, In some cases corporations are you for unions and not for the best reasons. I used to report in Mexico, and there's a practice they're called protection contracts, which has become standard. It's basically an agreement between a company, in these case automakers and an union that doesn't legitimately represent workers, UM, which agrees even years before they break ground on the plant, to keep wages really, really low. I'm wondering if you've ever seen anything similar in the US, or basically if you haven't, what's the bad side of unionizing. Yeah, I think that those are these kind of basically management kind of puppet unions UM. And I don't know that we've had so much of that in this country. We've certainly seen that in UM countries without much of the kind of more industrialized union base that got started here in the in in the Great Depression, UH, and you know, fought their way off and violently into a much more solid part of the job market, at least until their membership really started to erode back in the in the eighties or so with the pat Co strike. But if you go back to the days of early unionism and to sit down strike at Flint in the nineteen thirties, UM, there was these were militant unions sometimes and militant management by the way on the other side, and they were fighting tooth and nail for UM what I'm calling bargaining power. But back then they would have very much have seen as h pushing back on essentially a corrupt system that wasn't affording them the UH the pay that they believe they deserved. So we we have to my knowledge, and I must say that I haven't focused on this as much, especially as unionization rates have gotten so low, But we haven't had the kind of company union so much here that you're describing in Mexico, Jared. When we originally were coming up with the idea for this topic on this podcast, we were looking at the the Hollywood writers, the TV writers, and they were threatening to go on strike, and we were going to do a show about how they were on strike and what that says about the economy. And in fact, at the very last minute, they reached a settlement with the studios and and got some uh what what seemed like some some decent pay increases or benefit or benefits from that deal. And also a year ago we had this big Verizon strike and even though both sides claimed victory, there was some indication that that this strike was able to get some benefits for for the Verizon workers that maybe they wouldn't have had if they weren't able to get organized. Now, putting these events together, are these two things representative of what unions can still do in the economy or they really kind of the exception to the rule when it comes to workers bargaining power these days, more the exception than the rule. Uh. Interestingly, I think the way people in the union movement are starting to think about the way forward. And remember, we talked about a seven percent unionization rate in the private sector, and that's as we've been saying, that's a multi decade trend. And those kinds of trends are hard to turn around. So folks are trying to think outside the box, and they're thinking less about well, actually, in a way, it's it's less about the kind of the Brizon model and more the writer's model. That is, UH, instead of thinking about organizing an industry, organizing a sector, organizing fast food, or organizing retail, they're thinking about how they can organize place by place. Now, this would take a change in labor law, UM, and so you're not going to see that from this administration. But the idea is that especially with a more sort of what some people call the the fisher economy or the gig economy, the the W two economy, the idea that you're working maybe less for a particular employer, there's more UM of self employment, UH, independent contracting, things like that. UM. With with with those kinds of developments going on, UM, people are starting to think more about trying to form unions at a particular restaurant versus UH the restaurant industry. UM that that if they're able to pull that off, that may may give them some uh may give them some success. So Jerry, we definitely have a tight labor market. We saw a high number of openings and quits this morning. So with or without unions, what's it gonna take for us to see higher wages in the US? Well, I think the wage story is a really interesting one. Um. Uh. Wages have accelerated, as I'm sure you know, if you go back, uh a year and a half or so, wages we're growing two percent year over year nominal. Uh. Now they're growing somewhere between two point five and three percent. I have an index that I put together which takes five different series and smashes it together in some sort of sophisticated waiting way. Um, and uh, it's it's growing. It was growing two percent, now it's growing two point eight percent. Um. So we're getting some some uh bump. But the thing that's got me nervous now, and this is only a few months so these numbers, as you know, are jumpy, is that if you look at the blue collar wage or the wage of non managers and services, so of the workforce that's not in the that that's that's in those categories. Um, they went from two to two point five and they've just been sitting at two point five for a number of months, even as the jobless rate has come down. Now, if you look at the other of the workforce with higher wages, they've started growing at a pace that's closer to three or even north of three. And so I'm worried that there's this wage inequality problem evolving. Uh, and I gotta be watching that. It's definitely a story that we will will continue to follow here at Bloomberg and on Benchmark. Jared Bernstein, thank you so much for being with us today. My pleasure Benchmark will be back next week and until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, or Bloomberg App, as well as on Apple podcast, Pocketcast, Stitcher, or wherever you might enjoy listening to podcasts. While you're there, take a minute to rate and review the show so more listeners can find us and let us know what you thought of the show. You can follow me on Twitter at at Scott Landman Patty you are at Patty Lea, and our guest Jared Bernstein is at at icon. Jared Benchmark is produced by Sarah Patterson. The head of Bloomberg Podcast is Alec McKay. Thanks for listening to you. Next time, n

So Dan, before we get started today, we just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know about something new from Bloomberg. Do you want to hear what it is? Go for it? Well. Starting now, you can actually use our Io s app or Bloomberg's Google Chrome extension to scan any news story on any website, instantly revealing relevant news and market data from Bloomberg and other sources related to the companies and the people you're reading about. So really, no matter where you're reading the news, you can bring the power of Bloomberg's news and data with you. It's pretty amazing. Download our Io s app or search for the Bloomberg extension on the Chrome Store to try it out. Learn more at bloomberg dot com. Backslash lanes. Just about every indicator of the US labor market shows that jobs are plentiful and we're pushing the limits of how many people can be employed. But many Americans still aren't seeing the kind of lift to their wallets that were used to with these kinds of numbers in the labor market. One possible explanation is that Americans are not organized in labor unions like they used to be. While unions have had some notable successes, like this year's deal by Hollywood writers that averted a strike, or the victory by forty thou unionized Verizon workers last year. Most American workers lack the bargaining power that they had throughout much of the twenty century. Today on Benchmark, we're speaking with an expert on this subject, Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden. I'm Scott Landman and economics editor for Bloomberg News in Washington. Joining me as a guest co host today is Patricia Leiah, a reporter covering the U. S economy, also here in d C. Patty, thanks for being here, h I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so. Patty, You've just covered the latest US employment report that came out last Friday. What stood out to you in that report? Yeah, so the headline number for April was pretty good, especially after a disappointing March that was partly caused by that snowstorm we saw that affected most of the northeast Stella. But even as the main headline number came above, estimates, on the jobless rate fell, which growth was still a bit disappointing. It's just not at the level where it used to be in previous recoveries, right, and that's been a puzzle for a while. Now the labor market is getting tighter and tighter, but we're just not seeing the kind of three percent four percent pay gains that had happened in previous expansions when we had a tight labor market that kind of looked like this. So for more on this now, let's bring in Jared Bernstein, since he has been a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and before working in the Obama administration, he was at the Economic Policy Institute and was also Deputy Chief Economist at the Labor to Artment during the Clinton years. He's also a pretty good basketball player, as I found out some years ago. Jared joins us by phone from his office in Washington. Now, Jared, thanks for spending time with us on Benchmark. My pleasure, though I have to say my teammates last night would not describe me as a pretty good basketball player. But at any rate, I'm I'm better at the labor market stuff. I guess, well we'll focus on that today. Good. So, there there are lots of things, Jared that are different about having a job in America today compared with forty or fifty years ago. Was it really better back then? Or are we looking through rose colored glasses at the past. Well, in terms of the connection between wages and the job market, things were better for various groups of workers, not everybody. In fact, if you look at the gender wage differential, women were earning a lot less than men for comparable, comparable work back then than they are now. There was still discrimination in the job market in other ways as well. But if you're simply talking about basically two things, the tightness in the labor market and the way that tightness mapped onto people's paychecks, Yeah, that was that was better back then. So let me give you a pretty mind blowing statistic on this. Uh it used to be the case, I was Patty was saying, at least by some metrics, the current job market might be described as being at full employment. I'm not sure I quite see it, but that's a certainly a legitimate thing to declare. Well, since nineteen eighty, we've been at full employment less than thirty percent of the time. Before eight, say, the late forties to nineteen eighty, we were at full employment almost seventy percent of the time, so we were much more likely to have a tight labor market, and a tight labor market delivers some bargaining cloud to uh middle and lower rage workers. Of course, as you kind of mentioned in your intro, we were more unionized back then as well, so economic growth mapped onto the paychecks of middle wage workers more uh robustly then than it does now. Let me share some facts with our listeners from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The union membership rate was at ten point seven percent in it was over three and even the state with the highest union membership, New York, is at uh just under the lowest of South Carolina at one point six When when you think about the economy being at full employment, how how has that particular change affected the American worker? Are people not organized in unions to be able to take advantage of a full employment situation like they used to be? Well, I guess the way I look at it is a little bit differently, and the the in American style job markets, you know, we have a kind of a more rigorous version of capitalism than they do in in other more social democracies. Uh, your paycheck is not just a function of how skilled, you are, your value added. That's kind of what they teach you an economics class. But that's part of it, no question. But it's also a matter of your bargaining power, your bargaining clout. And historically there have been two factors that have contributed to the bargaining clout of middle and lower wage workers, or at least two factors. One is very tight labor market and f I mentioned earlier, that's been very much the exception, not the rule, over the last few decades, um and And the other is unionization. And your numbers are correct, I would simply um add to them that in the private sector, which is where most people work, uh, the unionization rate is only seven percent. So that's that's you know, getting a way below not only where it used to be, but where it is in in other advanced economies. There are some other factors that help determine wages at the level of the minimum way age, to the extent to which labor standards are enforced, the structure of employment. You've got the gig work that can sometimes play out in paychecks and ways that are negative for workers. But if you put it all together, the factors that used to give workers, more bargaining power, tight labor markets, high unionization rates, rigorously enforced labor standards. Many of those are things of the past. Right, you think that would be pretty good to be in an union. If you're a worker at a D and T, you have a pension, you have ritary health benefits, you probably have a bunch of other parts that people in the rest of corporate America gave up a long time ago. Right, Well, yes, there are definitely some unions that are still able to deliver that those kinds of benefits to their members. Um. Public sector unions often do a pretty good job, which is one reason why they're under siege and many states throughout the throughout the nation. Uh. And if you compare union workers to non union workers just based on their wages, controlling for everything else, there's still a significant premium there somewhere, I guess between ten and fiftent at least. But an interesting finding that that's germained to our conversation is that when unionization rates get higher, so right now they're about as you said here, but back when they're or if you go over to Europe and you see uh, union rates that are considerably higher than that you end up with a lot more pattern bargaining or collective bargaining where union wages enforced the pay of workers outside the union sector. So there's a spill over there that can happen as well. And you certainly don't see that when you're down to the kind of levels of of collective bargaining that we have our nations with that still have higher union membership rates experiencing faster wage growth than the United States has been with declining union membership, or has it been fairly consistent worldwide? Well, I think on average you wouldn't really find that UM, But I think if you look distributionally, their their wage distributions tend to be UM tighter, less dispersed than ours, They have less wage inequality, less less earnings dispersion UM, and in fact, in many cases, as their unionization rates go down, they end up with more of that UM. An important early study found that about a fifth of the increase in in wage dispersion, at least among men, was attributed to the decline in unionization. Now fifth may not sound like a ton, but that was the largest factor that I think anyone's ever uncovered in that in that research. Is it harder to organize labor unions these days, or oh yes, yeah, is there more apathy among workers or what is it? Well, I don't know that there's more apathy among workers. And in fact, if you pull people depending on the question, you know, these surveys can be a little squirrelly. Many people will say something to the effect of, we recognize that we need some form of an organization to push back on UM the kinds of things that our employers are trying to do to us. Now. They might not like the word union, but that's a pretty consistent finding. I think what's really different now is that there is a depocketed, multi billion dollar union avoidance industry, and you know, you'll see stores like Walmart closed down a franchise somewhere if they're worried that it's going to become unionized. So the UH, the anti union initiatives taken by UM employers, not not all, by the way, but those who are particularly averse to UH to union membership UM have gotten a lot more aggressive. I do think that workers probably think differently about unions than they used to. I know there was a case pretty recently, I think it was Volkswagen in maybe Tennessee, where the workers voted not to form a bargaining unit unit. And I wonder if some of what was going on there was a sense that the you know, the union wasn't going to really help them all that much. Let's drill down a little bit further into some of the wage data you have. By all indicators a tight labor market. The retail sector is a major is a fairly significant part of our employment. I think it's around fourteen fifteen million people are employed in retail. Uh, they're fairly low paid. UH. Maybe the wage gains, at least in some of the recent data have been have been pretty flat. Would could would they be potentially faster if there was more union organization in that sector or do you think there are other forces at play? I think that you'll find union wages are higher, as I mentioned earlier, that there's a premium there. Whether they're growing faster or not. UM, that's probably a tougher call. I don't I don't know that I've seen so much of that in the data. So probably more of a level story than a growth story. I think, you know, economists are scratching our heads over the the what we call the flatness of the Phillips curve, which is just a fancy way of saying the breakdown and the correlation between tight labor markets and price growth and wage growth. Uh, whether you're looking at prices or wages, you might expect there to be more uh growth when you're you're down at an unemployment rate that's four point four percent. But there are many explanations for that, by the way. One is that the federal reserves, at least in terms of inflation or prices, has kind of locked in everybody's heads that are going to target two percent no matter what, so inflation is really quote well anchored. Another is, of course, the bargaining power story that I've I've been talking about we've been discussing throughout our our conversation. Uh and UH. Another is the bargaining power discussion that we've been having uh throughout our conversation. UH. And then there is kind of a sectual story, as you were suggesting, UM, there are sectors in our economy that are facing a set of pressures they didn't face fourty or fifty years ago. For instance, our manufacturers are in much more of a global competitive situation than they were back in those days of you know, literally two and three percent unemployment rates if you go back to the nineteen sixties. UM and so, uh what what While globalization has many upsides, no question, particularly in terms of the supply of resources, liquid supply chains and all that, UM, for many workers, blue collar workers, production workers, workers and manufacturing, that kind of wage competition has hurt them. M. That's become a very politically salient effect in recent years. Need I say, Jared, In some cases corporations are you for unions and not for the best reasons. I used to report in Mexico, and there's a practice they're called protection contracts, which has become standard. It's basically an agreement between a company, in these case automakers and an union that doesn't legitimately represent workers, UM, which agrees even years before they break ground on the plant, to keep wages really, really low. I'm wondering if you've ever seen anything similar in the US, or basically if you haven't, what's the bad side of unionizing. Yeah, I think that those are these kind of basically management kind of puppet unions UM. And I don't know that we've had so much of that in this country. We've certainly seen that in UM countries without much of the kind of more industrialized union base that got started here in the in in the Great Depression, UH, and you know, fought their way off and violently into a much more solid part of the job market, at least until their membership really started to erode back in the in the eighties or so with the pat Co strike. But if you go back to the days of early unionism and to sit down strike at Flint in the nineteen thirties, UM, there was these were militant unions sometimes and militant management by the way on the other side, and they were fighting tooth and nail for UM what I'm calling bargaining power. But back then they would have very much have seen as h pushing back on essentially a corrupt system that wasn't affording them the UH the pay that they believe they deserved. So we we have to my knowledge, and I must say that I haven't focused on this as much, especially as unionization rates have gotten so low, But we haven't had the kind of company union so much here that you're describing in Mexico, Jared. When we originally were coming up with the idea for this topic on this podcast, we were looking at the the Hollywood writers, the TV writers, and they were threatening to go on strike, and we were going to do a show about how they were on strike and what that says about the economy. And in fact, at the very last minute, they reached a settlement with the studios and and got some uh what what seemed like some some decent pay increases or benefit or benefits from that deal. And also a year ago we had this big Verizon strike and even though both sides claimed victory, there was some indication that that this strike was able to get some benefits for for the Verizon workers that maybe they wouldn't have had if they weren't able to get organized. Now, putting these events together, are these two things representative of what unions can still do in the economy or they really kind of the exception to the rule when it comes to workers bargaining power these days, more the exception than the rule. Uh. Interestingly, I think the way people in the union movement are starting to think about the way forward. And remember, we talked about a seven percent unionization rate in the private sector, and that's as we've been saying, that's a multi decade trend. And those kinds of trends are hard to turn around. So folks are trying to think outside the box, and they're thinking less about well, actually, in a way, it's it's less about the kind of the Brizon model and more the writer's model. That is, UH, instead of thinking about organizing an industry, organizing a sector, organizing fast food, or organizing retail, they're thinking about how they can organize place by place. Now, this would take a change in labor law, UM, and so you're not going to see that from this administration. But the idea is that especially with a more sort of what some people call the the fisher economy or the gig economy, the the W two economy, the idea that you're working maybe less for a particular employer, there's more UM of self employment, UH, independent contracting, things like that. UM. With with with those kinds of developments going on, UM, people are starting to think more about trying to form unions at a particular restaurant versus UH the restaurant industry. UM that that if they're able to pull that off, that may may give them some uh may give them some success. So Jerry, we definitely have a tight labor market. We saw a high number of openings and quits this morning. So with or without unions, what's it gonna take for us to see higher wages in the US? Well, I think the wage story is a really interesting one. Um. Uh. Wages have accelerated, as I'm sure you know, if you go back, uh a year and a half or so, wages we're growing two percent year over year nominal. Uh. Now they're growing somewhere between two point five and three percent. I have an index that I put together which takes five different series and smashes it together in some sort of sophisticated waiting way. Um, and uh, it's it's growing. It was growing two percent, now it's growing two point eight percent. Um. So we're getting some some uh bump. But the thing that's got me nervous now, and this is only a few months so these numbers, as you know, are jumpy, is that if you look at the blue collar wage or the wage of non managers and services, so of the workforce that's not in the that that's that's in those categories. Um, they went from two to two point five and they've just been sitting at two point five for a number of months, even as the jobless rate has come down. Now, if you look at the other of the workforce with higher wages, they've started growing at a pace that's closer to three or even north of three. And so I'm worried that there's this wage inequality problem evolving. Uh, and I gotta be watching that. It's definitely a story that we will will continue to follow here at Bloomberg and on Benchmark. Jared Bernstein, thank you so much for being with us today. My pleasure Benchmark will be back next week and until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, or Bloomberg App, as well as on Apple podcast, Pocketcast, Stitcher, or wherever you might enjoy listening to podcasts. While you're there, take a minute to rate and review the show so more listeners can find us and let us know what you thought of the show. You can follow me on Twitter at at Scott Landman Patty you are at Patty Lea, and our guest Jared Bernstein is at at icon. Jared Benchmark is produced by Sarah Patterson. The head of Bloomberg Podcast is Alec McKay. Thanks for listening to you. Next time, n