On this Labor Day, we turn our attention to unions.

From Marketplace, I'm Novosafo and for David Brancaccio, a new report from the Treasury

Department finds that union membership often means higher wages, 10-15% higher.

Digging deeper into the report, Lane Windham, a labor historian at Georgetown University,

points out that underrepresented workers have seen bigger wage gains when covered by

labor contracts.

The unions help eliminate implicit bias because the contract lays out how much people

are going to get paid, everybody gets paid that, right?

And so there is just less room for the kind of implicit bias that you might see if a

supervisor is setting the wage rate.

The Treasury report shows unionized Latinx workers saw wage gains of 35%, black workers

20% and women 23%.

In disclosure, union employees here at Marketplace are members of SAG-AFTRA, although they're

represented under a different contract than SAG members currently on strike.

The Federal Reserve releases its beige book on Wednesday.

It's a snapshot of the economy with anecdotal information from around the country.

Recent data is pointing to a soft landing where the Fed manages to slow the economy just

enough to cool inflation, but without causing a recession.

Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer joins me now.

Good morning, Nancy.

Good morning.

So I'm not sure if you're a gambler, but would you bet on a soft landing?

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