Unions give blacks a wage boost - study

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2008/04/15/2008-04-15_unions_give_blacks_a_wage_boost__study.html

BY RACHEL MONAHAN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, April 15th 2008, 4:00 AM

For Wallace Mortimer Jones of East Flatbush, making more money meant climbing up just two floors.

He worked as a guard for more than six years in the basement-level loading docks at a Rockefeller Center building, where he earned $7 an hour when he left in 2001.

"It felt kind of unfair to know ... you're doing so much for so little," said Jones, 53.

But now that he has a union security job in the building's lobby, Jones earns $18.79 an hour, plus health insurance and a 401K plan. The real difference isn't the floor he's on, but the union job, he said.

Jones' work history illustrates the finding of a report on unions issued for the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, where he had gone not for a civil rights rally, but in support of a sanitation workers' strike.

The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research found African-American union workers' wages between 2004 and 2007 were on average 12% higher than nonunion African-Americans' wages.

FULL story at link.