Gordon's thesis made him less sympathetic to their quandary than common humanity warrants. Managers are people too. For the answers to questions like these, see Gordon's book. In a sign that consumer demand is in fact contracting, at least eight major retailers filed for bankruptcy last year, and analysts were predicting more filings this year in the wake of the miserable Christmas shopping season, which saw mainly upscale retailers, who cater to the top 20 percent of the work force, enjoy good sales. The biggest negative incentive would be to change the law so that unions can fight back against the Big Stick.
Union membership tracks the decline in wages.
The union wage, as a study by David Card and Alan B. Krueger, of Princeton University, has shown, puts upward pressure on all wages, and so all workers have a stake in union expansion. Gordon recommended simple changes in the law that would make it easier for unions to organize and would allow all but the top managerial employees to join. This would give a fillip to wages and especially to the wages of women, since 58.8 percent of employed women work at or below the minimum wage. In a numerically surprising analysis, Gordon showed how the wages of more than 20 million workers have been negatively affected by the fall in the real value of the minimum wage. Extend a variety of direct subsidies to firms that drop the Big Stick.