A report released last month shows that the gap in wages between white workers and their black counterparts is larger today than it was nearly four decades ago and, if the past is any indication of the gap in next 35 years, it is bound to get worse, if no action is taken.

“We’ve found that racial wage gaps are growing primarily due to discrimination—and other unmeasured and unobserved characteristics—along with rising inequality in general,” said William M. Rodgers, a Rutgers University economist. “In order to fully address racial wage gaps, direct action must be taken to decrease discrimination and address the problem of stagnant wages across the board.”

The study was done by Rodgers and Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, and covers the period 1979-2015. It’s always good to have the back-up of scholarship and study to prove what most wage working men and women know when the bills come in to be paid at the end of the month, or at the dinner table each night. It’s especially true for black wageworkers, because the gap in their pay is not only a blight for the 1979-2015 period, but it has been a blight on the history of the nation for generations.

Repeatedly, studies have shown that wages have virtually stagnated for millions of workers over the past four decades and the wages of black and other minorities have lagged even those numbers. The disparity in wealth between black and white workers is a scandal for which there is no excuse, except for rank discrimination and prejudice.

Proof of that appears in the difference in the wages and income of black college graduates and white high school graduates. It’s not that a college education has not been a benefit to millions of black wageworkers and professionals. It has, but when it comes to hiring a qualified black applicant, too often a prospective employer will hire a less-educated and possibly less-qualified white applicant. It simply comes down to prejudice and discrimination.

The EPI report by Rodgers and Wilson notes: “In 2015, black men’s average hourly wages were 22.0 percent less than those of comparable white men, whereas in 1979, the wage gap was only 16.9 percent. Similarly, with an adjusted average hourly wage gap of only 4.5 percent, black and white women were near parity in 1979. In 2015, however, black women experienced an 11.7 percent wage gap relative to white women, while the wage gap between black women and white men was 34.2 percent.”

Black and other minority workers are losing ground and have been losing ground for nearly 40 years. It’s historic, yes, and goes back to Reconstruction and Jim Crow, but the period covered by this EPI study shows just how deeply and negatively the U.S. economy has been affected by trade agreements that have favored transnational corporations and the rising (or perhaps, previously hidden deep racism) of the nation. If anything has brought that into the open, it has been the current presidential-year election and, especially, the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.

The two authors of the study suggest a number of measures that will somewhat mitigate the problem of the racial wage gap, such as developing new measures of determining workplace discrimination, ordering the governmental agencies that monitor such things to enforce the anti-discrimination laws that are already on the books, and taking action to raise the minimum wage, which currently stands at $7.25 an hour. The nationwide fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage has been going on for several years and individual states have passed laws that will see the minimum rise over the next three or four years. Not good enough, because too many states want the right to keep the minimum wage low, in keeping with Corporate America’s wishes and their efforts to make their states the low-wage centers that will draw industries to locate in those states. They have witnessed the flood of jobs and industry flow from the U.S., to other, developing countries, and they want to emulate that philosophy and that flow.

In Trump, we have the philosophy of the billionaire class, which claims that wages are “too high” in the U.S. and that makes the nation uncompetitive in the global economy, even as he woos the working class to support his effort to gain the White House. Many of them have fallen for it, even though he cares little for workers, given the way he has treated them in all of his enterprises, including failure to pay them their just wages and stiffing untold numbers of workers and contractors.

Let us not give his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, a free ride. She would have been satisfied with a $2-3 increase in the minimum wage, thus keeping the working poor poorer, until the pressure from the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed her to $10.10, then to $12, and finally, to the $15 that fast food workers and other low wage workers have been rallying and striking for in the past few years. She has been pushed into positions on the issues by Sanders and his supporters that she never would have embraced without the pressures of the primary campaign, since her instincts are with those of the billionaire class, just as her opponents are.

Under her watch as secretary of state, the State Department interfered in Haiti, when it was proposed several years ago, to raise the minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, foreign “investors” (read U.S. textile, clothing, and other companies) fought vigorously to keep the wages lower and succeeded. The wage was lowered from 61 cents to 31 cents and the working families were left struggling with a starvation wage. It took an estimated $12.50 a day at that time for minimal decent living, but the 31 cents brought a day’s pay to only about $5. The wage was increased in 2014, but it was still far below the amount needed for a family to live.

Because of the confluence of many problems across the U.S. economy, there are millions of workers who never will be able to really retire and that goes double or triple for black workers and other minorities. There are those who are working (low wage jobs) well into their eighties, because the meager benefits of Social Security for poverty wage workers is just not enough and the health care benefits of Medicare and Medicaid are just not enough to live a decent life. Often, failing health is the one thing that stops these millions from working into advanced old age. In such a rich nation, that should never be. Yet, whichever candidate wins the White House it does not appear that there is much of a change possible, at least in overall policy.

Although Wilson and Rodgers include in their suggestions for change to benefit low- wage workers “strengthening workers’ ability to collectively bargain,” they stop just short of a full-throated call for unionization of workers. That is really the only way that black workers will be able to unite and fight for their rightful place in the American economy and mainstream. After all of the problems over all of the generations, it might be well for black workers to begin to form black-led unions. No one else knows better what is needed to improve the lives of workers in the community. Unity is the key. Solidarity is the key. Imagine a 2-million-member union of black workers, paying their dues and participating fully in the economic, political, and social life of the country. It would be a force to be reckoned with.