Want a reason to support unions? A union may help keep you alive.

Your chances of surviving a hospital stay after a myocardial infarction—also known as a heart attack—are higher if your nurses are in a union than if they’re not.

That’s the conclusion of a study by academics at the University of Massachusetts and the University of California. It’s also part of a much larger picture that the media ignore, that might give even right-wing Republicans a reason to support unions, and that makes the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics evidence of a dwindling union presence bad news for all of us.

The New York Times posted an editorial today highlighting the need for high-paying American jobs, a shift from austerity to investments in our infrastructure and economy and strengthening workers' rights to collectively bargain for a voice on the job. The Times is publishing a series of editorials "on what President Obama and Congress should tackle in the next four years.” Other editorials can be found here. 

This is the fourth of a four-part series describing what went wrong with America’s economy and how to fix it. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here—and please leave a comment to tell us what you think. (Click the chart to enlarge.) 

To fix what’s wrong with the U.S. economy, we have to replace the failed low-wage economic strategy of the past 30 years with a high-wage strategy for shared prosperity.

The first step in such a high-wage strategy is to put America back to work because high unemployment keeps wages down. Our goal should be “full employment,” meaning everybody who wants to work should be able to find a decent job. We can’t allow the unfounded fear of inflation to be used as an excuse to keep unemployment high and wages low.

The U.S. public is painfully aware of the growing income inequality in this nation.

Now, a new report shows a big reason why the gap is growing: fewer workers in unions.

Declining unionization was responsible for roughly one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men from 1973 to 2007, a new Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report finds. Declining unionization can explain roughly one-fifth of the growth of wage inequality among women over the same period (click to enlarge chart).

Asian American and Pacific Islander workers who belong to unions enjoy a large wage and benefit advantage over their nonunion counterparts, according to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).