Why Do Labor Unions Support Minimum Wage Laws?

Labor unions strongly advocate for minimum wage laws, which may seem unusual because few union workers earn minimum wage salaries. One could argue that labor unions advocate for higher minimum wages because they care for the rights of the entire working class, but Thomas Sowell has a more cynical view about their motives, arguing that labor unions support minimum wage laws instead to protect their own jobs from competition. Sowell notes that since many products can be made with a mixture of both low and high skilled labor, “experienced unionized workers are competing for employment against younger, inexperienced, and less skilled workers, whose pay is likely to be at or near the minimum wage. The higher the minimum wage goes, the more the unskilled and inexperienced workers are likely to be displaced by more experienced and higher skilled unionized workers” (p. 110). When program developers and evaluators examine the root causes of problems like youth unemployment, they should consider whether government policy is partly responsible for making young workers too expensive to hire.

Reference

Thomas Sowell (2011). The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books.