To Reduce Urban Inequality, Reconsider Unions

Cities have become simmering cauldrons of economic inequality, especially after the Great Recession. In his new book, Richard Florida writes that this condition is at the heart of what he calls the “New Urban Crisis,” and suggests fixes in the form of equitable housing, tax, infrastructure, and anti-poverty policies.

But there’s another solution, now largely overlooked, that has helped reduce gross inequality in the past: collective bargaining. In a new working paper, economists Brantly Callaway at Temple University and William J. Collins at Vanderbilt University examine the decades after the Great Depression, when economic inequality declined dramatically—and then stayed low for several decades after. They conclude that the simultaneous rise of unionization during this time “was not merely a coincidence.”