3 ms·

Lifetime here means "until age of 65" (or whichever age after 58 is the last in the dataset for an individual), and the measure is earnings so before people get

• ghaff 4y ago
  That was my reading as well. And, of course, there are also quite a few non-union legacy defined benefit pensions as they were pretty standard at big companies for a long time. As someone else commented, a lot of big unions aligned with well-paying blue collar jobs (as well as at least solidly paying public sector etc. work). I'm not sure that you can conclude those jobs were better paying because of unions or because you had relatively empowered organized groups of workers who formed unions.
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    Government is a great example of why unions make sense. Exempt employees working in legislative or executive roles make peanuts and work their asses off. They may not get raises and sometimes get schnookered out of pensions. Mainstream government workers make average/below average pay with premium benefits. In better states to work, your benefits are 40% of salary.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  Depends on if it's total compensation or not. The money in your pension is "paid" to you when you're old, but it's ideally being released to you from a annuity that is already paid up. Business-friendly laws usually enable companies to keep these funds insolvent, and instead to maintain their retirees as creditors indefinitely, but that's not the model.