Tunga ekonomer tar ställning för facket

Via Mark Thomas blogg hittar jag något anmärkningsvärt: ett gäng tunga nationalekonomer har skrivit under ett slags upprop som publicerats som annons i Washington Post.

Vad de argumenterar för är en "Employee Free Choice Act", som ska underlätta fackligt organiserande och kollektivavtalsslutande i USA.

Det är inga dåliga namn som skrivit under; bland dem är Philippe Aghion (Harvard), Kenneth Arrow (Stanford), Jagdish Bhagwati (Columbia), Alan Blinder (Princeton), Brad DeLong (UC Berkeley), Robert Frank (Cornell), Richard Freeman (Harvard), Dani Rodrik (Harvard), Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia) och Robert Solow (MIT). De börjar sin argumentation som följer:

"Although its collapse has dominated recent media coverage, the financial sector is not the only segment of the U.S. economy running into serious trouble. The institutions that govern the labor market have also failed, producing the unusual and
unhealthy situation in which hourly compensation for American workers has stagnated even as their productivity soared. Indeed, from 2000 to 2007, the income of the median working-age household fell by $2,000 – an unprecedented decline. In that time, virtually all of the nation’s economic growth went to a small number of wealthy Americans. An important reason for the shift from broadly-shared prosperity to growing inequality is the erosion of workers’ ability to form unions and bargain collectively.
A natural response of workers unable to improve their economic situation is to form unions to negotiate a fair share of the economy, and that desire is borne out by recent surveys. Millions of American workers – more than half of non-managers – have
said they want a union at their work place. Yet only 7.5% of private sector workers are now represented by a union. And in all of 2007, fewer than 60,000 workers won union status through government-sanctioned elections. What explains this disconnect?" (se pdf här)

Det känns rent socialdemokratiskt..