It's well-known that female union workers earn more money and enjoy better benefits than non-union workers. But is joining a union more valuable to a woman worker than earning a college degree? The report "Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers" released by the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPF) in December 2008 reveals some significant findings:

[U]nionized women workers earned, on average, 11.2 percent more than their non-union peers....[and] were much more likely to have health insurance benefits and a pension plan.
"For women, joining a union makes as much sense as going to college," said John Schmitt, a Senior Economist at CEPR and the author of the study. "All else equal, joining a union raises a woman's wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree."

The report...found that unionization raises the pay of women workers by almost $2.00 per hour....[W]omen workers in unions were also 19 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, all the more significant, since women pay higher premium rates individually than men. Women workers were also 26 percentage points more likely to have an employer-provided pension plan than women workers who were not in unions.

The benefits of union membership were even greater for women in low-wage occupations such as:

• food preparation workers
• cashiers
• cafeteria workers
• child-care workers
• cooks
• housekeeping cleaners
• home-care aides
• packers and packagers
• janitors
• grounds maintenance workers
• nursing and home-health aides
• stock clerks
• teachers' assistants
• aborers and freight workers
• security guards

Unionized women workers in these jobs benefited from significantly higher salaries and were more likely to have health insurance and a pension than non-unionized women workers. The median wage of non-union women - $9.00/hour - was almost $3.00 less than the media wage of union women at $11.95/hour. Nearly 60% of union women had health insurance as compared to just over 25% of non-union women. For pension plans, the statistics were similiar; 58% of union women had a pension compared to 21% of non-union women.
Unions have seen steady growth in women members; in 2007, 45% of union members were female. If growth trends of the last 25 years continue, in 2020 the majority of union members will be female.

From 2004-2007 about 13.5% of all workers were union members, with 12.5% of women workers in or represented by a union.

The CEPR report concludes that the benefits of unionization are large, "even when compared to extensive public and private investments in education," and notes:

[W]omen who are able to bargain collectively earn more and are more likely to have benefits associated with good jobs. The data strongly suggest that better protection of workers' right to unionize would have a substantial positive impact on the pay and benefits of women in the workforce.