Unions have been the punching bag for the American right for decades — no matter what the societal problem, conservatives’ first scapegoat is organized labor. But if you or a relative were in a nursing home when the coronavirus pandemic hit, you would probably have wanted to be in one whose workers were unionized — because new data suggests you’d have a better chance of surviving the disease.

The study by researchers at George Washington University and the medical schools at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University found that nursing homes in New York state that were staffed by unionized health care workers saw COVID mortality rates among residents that were 30 percent lower than those in nonunionized nursing homes.

The data confirms what a body of scholarship has already shown: patient outcomes are better when the workers taking care of them are members of unions. The findings are especially significant, because New York state nursing homes were the epicenter of the pandemic for the period of time this spring that the study authors looked at.