"Changing Role of Unions"
Middlebury College's 23rd Annual Economics Conference
April 13-14, 2002
KIRK ALUMNI CENTER
| Organizer: |
Phanindra V. Wunnava
Professor of Economics
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753
wunnava@middlebury.edu
voice/ : 802-443-5024/ |
Funded by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation
Participants and Abstracts | Participant Bios| Program
OVERVIEW
Many studies have been done on the union-nonunion wage differential, based primarily on US data. Other aspects of unions and the phenomenon of unionization have received scant attention in the literature, such as the following, which will be the focus of this conference:
(i) the success of unionization in certain sectors even when there is a declining trend in overall union membership (for example, the role of the internet in attracting new union members, and union-drives among illegal immigrants),
(ii) lessons from the past and new frontiers in modeling unionization,
(iii) updates, comparisons and contrasts of the effects of unions on wages and employment across the US and the OECD countries,
(iv) the desire to unionize and the role of unions in the development and shaping of workplace practices, and
(v) an exploration of the link between politics and the success of union organizing etc.
The main goal of this conference is to bring together the multi-faceted efforts of a number of researchers working on these diverse aspects of union-related issues. The resulting mixture of perspectives should help shed light on the evolving role of unions in the 21st century.