Healthy State, Worried Workers:
North Carolina in the World Economy
Edward Gresser
that their great unmet needs are for portable health insurance and pensions, job placement, and
ways to ensure that career transitions do not threaten a family’s ability to make mortgage and
tuition payments. A new role in ‘career protection,’ in which unions would help serve as
guarantors of health care and pension coverage for workers in transition, and/or offer job
placement services and skill development, might be very attractive to the mobile but nervous
21st century worker. It has proven so, in fact, in the Scandinavian countries whose economies
are highly open to trade, and whose unions are the healthiest in the world.