This paper provides evidence on how wage inequality among workers affects the labor movement using three complementary research designs: a vignette experiment with union organizers, a natural policy experiment that increased wage inequality among Wisconsin school teachers, and an information intervention during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. Across all studies, we find that inequality undermines union strength through multiple channels. First, workers with high individual bargaining power are more likely to withdraw support in unequal environments, preferring individual over collective bargaining. Second, union organizers facing hypothetical choices strategically respond to inequality in ways that may preserve membership but limit redistribution, such as shifting their campaign away from wages and choosing smaller, more homogeneous bargaining units.

Political debates often invoke moral concerns to justify in-kind transfers, such as a right to health care. These concerns seem to go beyond how the goods affect recipients’ welfare, and appear to differ across goods. Economists, by contrast, typically evaluate transfers using "welfarist" frameworks that depend only on how goods affect recipients’ utility and do not permit good-specific redistributive concerns beyond such impacts. We perform real-stakes experiments that isolate non-welfarist from welfarist motives. We find sizable non-welfarist preferences to provide health care and legal aid to low-income recipients, and weaker non-welfarist preferences for comparison goods such as bus passes and YMCA memberships. In targeting experiments, participants favor more universal provision of lawyers and health care, even holding welfarist value fixed. We estimate a model that maps participants’ targeting choices into good-specific welfare weights. Goods associated with stronger moral concerns receive less progressive welfare weights and, consequently, are optimal to provide more universally than comparison goods with equal impacts on recipients’ utility.