The Floor We Forgot We Were Standing On

I entered the workforce in the early 1980s—right about the time a lot of bigger economic ideas were starting to take hold.

And like a lot of folks, I had my moments where I’d look around at a job and think, We’re getting screwed here.

Different job, same feeling.

But here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud enough: I was part of the problem too. Not in some grand, villainous way. Just in the ordinary, everyday, short-sighted way a lot of us were.

My logic was simple: why would I join a union and pay dues every week or every month, especially when I thought I could get the same base pay without paying into it?

From where I was standing, it looked like this: union wages set the floor, companies still had to stay competitive for non-union workers, and my pay was “negotiable.”

In my mind, that meant upside.

Why cap myself under a contract when I could go out and get more on my own?

It sounded smart at the time.

What I—and a lot of others—missed was that the “floor” we were benefiting from didn’t exist on its own. It existed because unions had the strength to set it.

Starting in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, that strength began to fade. Fewer people joined. Companies pushed back harder. And moments like the PATCO strike were widely understood as signals about which way things were heading.

Once fewer people bought in, the leverage behind those wages started to slip.

And when that leverage slipped, something else happened quietly:

The floor did not hold.

It softened.

Companies didn’t need to match union-level wages or benefits the same way anymore, because the force that once demanded them wasn’t as strong. And that idea of “negotiable pay”? It cuts both ways.

In a strong market, maybe you can negotiate up.

But when the balance of power shifts—and it did—that same flexibility becomes:

• “That’s the offer, take it or leave it.”
• Fewer benefits.
• Less security.
• More exposure to restructurings, redundancies, and layoffs.

And those layoffs weren’t rare footnotes in the 1980s. They became part of the working landscape. Plants closed. Departments got trimmed. Middle managers got “reorganized.” People who thought they were building careers suddenly found out they were line items.

That is one reason many Boomers and Gen Jones workers reached retirement age with less security than the old bargain had promised.

The promise was steady work, rising wages, pensions, and security.

The reality for many was interrupted careers, lost benefits, cashed-out retirement accounts, and starting over more times than they ever expected.

What I thought was independence was, in a lot of ways, giving up collective leverage without realizing it.

And I wasn’t alone.

A lot of us made that same calculation:

Why pay into something when I can ride along for free?

The problem is, when enough people think that way, there’s nothing left to ride on.

And that’s where this ties into the bigger picture.

About the same time Americans were being told that prosperity would “trickle down,” something else was quietly happening that didn’t make the slogan. The people who used to negotiate for that prosperity were losing their seat at the table.

For a long stretch of American history, unions weren’t some fringe idea. They were one of the main ways growth actually showed up in a paycheck.

When a company did better, workers had a way to say:

Good. Now let’s talk about our share.

Then the ground shifted.

Starting in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, union membership began a steady decline. Total union membership was around 20 percent in 1983, but in the private sector the number was about 16.5 percent. Today, private-sector union membership is under 6 percent.

That’s not a small change.

That’s a different system.

Researchers have pointed to the PATCO strike as one of the moments that signaled a shift in the balance of power, and companies adjusted accordingly. Peer-reviewed work by economists such as David Card, Thomas Lemieux, and W. Craig Riddell has linked declining unionization to rising wage inequality. Another widely cited study by Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld found that the erosion of unions played a major role in widening the pay gap, especially for middle- and working-class men.

Meanwhile, productivity kept climbing.

The country was producing more per worker than ever. But pay for typical workers did not keep up with that growth. So you ended up with two things happening at once:

Growth at the top.

Less leverage at the bottom.

And that combination matters.

Because if gains do not naturally flow down, and workers do not have the leverage to ask for them, there is not much left to close the gap.

You don’t need an economics degree to see how that plays out.

It shows up in raises that don’t keep up with rent.

Health insurance that eats more of your paycheck each year.

Retirement shifting from “guaranteed” to “good luck.”

None of this means unions were perfect.

They weren’t.

There were inefficiencies, politics, and real problems. But taking them mostly out of the equation did not create balance.

It removed one of the main counterweights.

And without a counterweight, the scale does not stay level for long.

That’s the part that often gets missed.

The conversation was framed as:

Growth will take care of everything.

But at the exact same time, we weakened one of the main ways ordinary workers made sure growth included them.

So when people today say, “It doesn’t feel like the economy is working for me,” they’re not imagining it.

They’re describing what it looks like when the system changes—and nobody updates the promise.