WASHINGTON

THE FUTURE of organized labor is important not just for the 15.7 million workers in unions, but for the vast majority of the 154 million-member U.S. labor force.

The wages, benefits and working conditions of most employees are affected by collective bargaining even if they don’t have a union. For example, employers who want to keep out unions will sometimes have to offer their workers such amenities as health insurance.

One of the most important problems that our economy has faced for the last 30 years has been stagnating real wages. With inflation running at an annualized 10.6 percent rate over the last quarter, the problem appears to most people to be rising prices but for more than two decades before the past year, inflation has been tame. Yet the real — inflation-adjusted — wage of the typical employee barely increased at all over the whole 34 years from 1973-2007.

This is amazing, when we consider that productivity — the amount that workers produce per hour — increased quite substantially over that period. Measured very conservatively, if we take “usable productivity” — the increased production that we can expect to be reflected in rising wages — it rose by 48 percent in 1973-2007.

So our economy grows but, unlike in the past, most employees do not share in the gains. One important reason for this great leap backwards is that the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively have been sharply curtailed over the past three decades.

For example, employees do still have the legal right to petition for a federally run election at their workplace, in which workers can vote on whether or not to join a union. (To get such an election, they need the signatures of at least 30 percent of the employees.) But after the employees get enough signatures, employers very often intimidate workers through threats and firings before the vote is held.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has estimated that one in five workers actively involved in a union-organizing drive can expect to be fired. Many others are “persuaded” to vote against the union through a long, captive audience campaign of employer threats and harassment. As a result of these tactics, only about 12 percent of employees are organized in unions today, down from 35 percent in the 1950s.

Reform legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act would give employees a fighting chance to regain some of their lost rights. This bill would mandate that an employer recognize the union if it obtains the signatures of a majority of employees. There would be no need for a long and costly election campaign.

A recent poll by Global Strategies Group found that 68 percent of middle-class Americans support the Employee Free Choice Act. Polls also indicate that tens of millions would join a union if they had the choice. The bill passed the House 241-185 but was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. It’s a party-line split in the Senate (except for support from Republican Sen. Arlen Specter).

So the bill would need a Democratic president and something close to 59 Democrats in the Senate to pass. This law would probably change Americans’ lives more than any legislation since the New Deal brought us Social Security. The political influence of millions of new union members would also bring us closer to such basic reforms as universal health care. It’s all long overdue.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.