Participants: (in bold) / Abstracts
Richard Freeman (Harvard) and Joel Rogers (Univ of Wisconsin Law School)-
"Open-Source Unionism: Beyond Exclusive Collective Bargaining"
This paper examines the ways in which unions are using the Internet to improve their effectiveness in organizing, servicing members, and operating as democratic institutions. It argues that unions have to develop a new form of unionism for the New Economy in much the same manner that they had to develop CIO style industrial unionism in the 1930's and had to develop AFL style craft unionism in the 1890's. To see what new organizational form may best fit the 21st Century by assessing how the most innovative unions are using the Internet today and re-evaluate the Knights of Labor form as potentially better fitting the modern world than the craft and industrial forms of unionism that developed over the past century.
Henry FarberandBruce Western (Princeton) -
"Is Union Organizing Activity Affected by Large Union Successes and Failures?"
While research on U.S. union election activity has focused on the declining proportion of union victories, a large share of the decline in new union organizing is due to a fall in the number of elections contested. We examine the level of election activity and find that the number of union elections fell by 50 percent in the early 1980's but was trending downward both before and after this shift. However, there is substantial time-series variation around these trends. A formal model indicates that declining election activity may be due to an increasingly unfavorable political climate which significantly raises the costs of organizing or to changes in workers' attitudes toward unions, even tough the union win-rate remains unaffected. We identify substantial newsworthy events involving unions and investigate whether these events appear to affect the level of NLRB election activity.
Francine Blau and Larry Kahn (Cornell) -
"Collective Bargaining, Relative Wages and Employment: International Microeconmic Evidence"
Providing new micro-data on wage inequality and union membership across OECD countries – based on one of the chapters they wrote for a forthcoming book (New York: Russell Sage,2002) titled: At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor-Market Performance in International Perspective.
Christopher L Erickson (UCLA), Catherine Fisk (Loyola Law School), Ruth Milkman (UCLA), Daniel J.B. Mitchell (UCLA),andKent Wong (UCLA) -
"Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles and Beyond: A New Form of Unionism in the 21st Centruy?"
American unions have been declining as a percentage of the workforce for several decades. At present, only about a tenth of the private workforce is unionized. A key question, therefore, is whether there are circumstances and strategies that could allow union growth.
On the face of it, janitors in Los Angeles would seem an unlikely group to provide a union success story. The cleaning services industry in Los Angeles largely de-unionized in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, janitorial services to major office complexes were typically provided by low-wage, nonunion, immigrant workers - mainly Latinos. These workers were often undocumented and were scattered in small numbers at workplaces around the city. Moreover, they were employed by cleaning service contractors rather than the owners or managers of the buildings in which they worked. Such an indirect employment relationship presents legal barriers to traditional union organizing tactics. Labor is a major cost factor for cleaning service contractors. Because these contractors can easily be replaced by lower cost providers on short notice, they have a strong incentive to resist unionization.
Despite these obstacles, the Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaign of the Service Employees International Union succeeded in re-unionizing the cleaning service industry in Los Angeles. The tactics and successes have spread to other areas. JfJ is seen by organized labor as a model to be emulated. Moreover, janitorial unionization in Los Angeles has survived ups and downs in the business cycle and three bargaining rounds, suggesting that the JfJ strategy is sustainable.
Key factors that contributed to the success of the JfJ approach are its application in a non-tradable service industry, surprising industrial concentration of the cleaning services industry despite its low capital requirements, union use of pressure on building owners and managers - rather than the contractors - that surmounts legal barriers, union enlistment of key political and community figures in the organizing and bargaining campaigns, and public sympathy for the plight of the working poor. In addition, a union strategy of coordinated bargaining across cities appears able to leverage success in one area to achieve gains in others.
John S. Heywood (UW-Milwaukee) andClive R. Belfield (Columbia University) -
"The Desire for Unionization, HRM Practices and Coworkers: UK Evidence"
We investigate the desire of non-union workers in the UK to become represented by unions. Comparing our results to those from the US, we find those in the UK are less likely to desire unionization and express lower dissatisfaction with their influence at work. The determinants of the desire for unionization are estimated controlling for a wide variety of individual and workplace variables. The role of human resource management, and employee involvement in particular, are isolated. We identify a direct effect of these practices in reducing the desire for unionization and an indirect effect operating through the influence of employee relations, a major determinant of the desire for unionization. Also, we identify characteristics of co-workers that are associated with desire for unionization and examine the role information revelation may play in managerial strategies to forestall unions.
Barry Hirsch (Trinity University), David Macpherson (FSU),andEdward Schumacher (ECU) -
"Measuring Union and Nonunion Wage Growth: Puzzles in Search of Solutions"
There is conflicting evidence on changes over time in relative union-nonunion wages is the private sector. The BLS Employment Cost Index (ECI), based on quarterly establishment data and using fixed weights applied to job cell wage changes, shows a substantial decrease in wage growth for union relative to nonunion workers. The annual Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC), drawn from the same survey data as the ECI but constructed using current sectoral weights applied to wage levels, surprisingly shows no trend in relative union-nonunion wages. Household evidence from the Current Population Surveys (CPS) can potentially reconcile the conflicting ECI/ECEC evidence, but it is first necessary to adopt time-consistent methods to deal with workers whose earnings are allocated. Regression estimates using the CPS indicate a modestly declining private sector union premium. Yet CPS wage data absent controls, similar in principle to the ECEC calculation, shows a steep decline in relative union wages similar to that seen in the ECI. We next calculate union and nonunion wage growth from the CPS based on methods roughly consistent with the ECI and ECEC. These results shed rather dim light on the sources of ECI/ECEC differences. The contribution of the paper is its unearthing of contradictory evidence on union and nonunion wage growth which, taken together, forms a troubling puzzle. Although our analysis helps account for specific elements of this puzzle, a comprehensive solution to the puzzle remains undiscovered. We conclude that there has been closing in the union-nonunion wage gap since the mid-1980s, but the magnitude of the closing is anything but clear.
John Addison (U of South Carolina) and Clive R. Belfield (Columbia University) -
"Unions and Establishment Performance: Evidence from the British Workplace Industrial/Employee Relations Surveys"
An interesting aspect of British research on unions based on the Workplace Industrial/Employment Relations Surveys has been the apparent shift in union impact on establishment performance in the decade of the 1990s compared with the 1980s - and the recent scramble to explain the phenomenon. In this contribution, we chart these changes along the dimensions of financial performance, labor productivity, employment, quits, absenteeism, industrial relations climate and plant closings. Using the most recent workplace survey, we also investigate the controversial notion that union influence is positive where unions are strong and is negative where unions are weak. This notion, encountered in recent research in Britain (and Germany), emphasizes the benefits of the collective voice of unions, arguing that this voice is only "heard" when the union is strong or a credible agency. We examine this contention for a fuller array of definitions of union influence and workplace performance measures. Overall, our discussion reveals some evidence that is consistent with reduced bargaining power in the wake of anti-union reform measures and heightened product market competition. On the other hand, there is little support for the recherche notion that stronger unions have a beneficial impact, yet weaker ones do not.
Rafael Gomez(London School of Economics) andMorley Gunderson(U of Toronto) -
"The Experience Good Model of Trade Union Membership"
This paper re-examines the nature of trade union membership from a theoretical perspective. Our approach is based on a simple notion: that union membership can be modeled as an experience good with a bundle of attributes. Conceiving of the decision to join a union as a decision akin to the purchase of an experience good by consumers, generates several interesting empirical propositions. The paper "tests" some of these key propositions against the backdrop of existing empirical studies which look at the determination of union status of workers and their preferences for unionisation. Importantly, the experience good model of unionisation accounts for several major recent findings in the unionisation literature: namely (1) the intergenerational transmission of union status and preferences; (2) the persistence of trade union membership; (3) the observed post-purchase satisfaction (the incumbency effect) amongst workers who have ever sampled union membership and (4) the greater effect of social networks in influencing the desire for unionisation on the part of the young and those with less market experience.
Bruce Kaufman (GSU) -
"The Two Faces of Unionism: Implications for Union Growth"
The "two faces" that will be developed are (1) the positive conception of unions (e.g., from the older institutional literature) which conceives of unions in the economic sphere as a form of countervailing power and in the political/governance sphere as a form of industrial democracy and (2) the negative conception of unions (e.g., found in neoclassical economics) which conceives of unions as monopolies and boss-ridden/corrupt autocracies. I will then discuss how both the demand for unions by workers and the broader public turns on the degree to which they subscribe to face #1 or #2, and how in my estimation in recent years things have shifted to the #2 face. The implications for union growth will then be discussed, which appear to be negative unless and until economic events and internal innovations by unions bring the face #1 back to prominence (as in the Depression of the 30s).
Bradley T. Ewing(Texas Tech University) and Phanindra V. Wunnava(Middlebury College) -
"Union-Nonunion Wage Differentials and Macroeconomic Activity"
This research is concerned with identifying the differing responses of union and nonunion wages to shocks to real output growth, inflation, and the stance of monetary policy. Aggregate measures of union and nonunion wages and salaries are used to construct a time series of the wage differential for several major industrial sectors over the 1976-2001 period. The literature documents the existence of a union wage premium; however, previously the focus has primarily been at the micro-level, and on whether or not a union worker receives greater compensation than an otherwise comparable nonunion worker [e.g., Wunnava and Ewing (1999, 2000)]. Research also links the wage differential to the stage of the business cycle [Wunnava and Okunade 1996] and to the industrial sector [Okunade, Wunnava, and Robinson (1992)]. Theoretical macroeconomic models imply that wages will respond in certain ways to unanticipated changes in aggregate measures of economic activity [e.g., Romer (1996)]. Given the differences in compensation level of union and nonunion workers, and the link to the stage of the business cycle and industry, it is expected that the aggregate wage differentials both for the entire private sector and by industry will respond to macroeconomic shocks in a predictable manner. The relationship among these wage differentials and the macroeconomy is examined in the context of a vector autoregression. In addition, the paper employs the newly developed technique of generalized impulse response analysis [Koop, et al. (1996), Pesaran and Shin (1998)], a method that does not impose a priori restrictions on the relative importance that each of the macroeconomic variables may play in the transmission process. The results show the extent and the magnitude of the relationship between the union-nonunion wage differentials and several key macroeconomic factors. Finally, the paper documents how the responses of these wage differentials vary by industrial sector.
Sarah Brown (University of Leicester) and John G. Sessions (Brunel University) -
" International Competition, Trade Unions, and the Labour Market Prospects of Union and Nonunion Workers"
We investigate the relationship between international competition and the labour market prospects of a representative sample of British workers. Our analysis, which sets out the first explicit test of both the wage and employment implications of increased international competition, highlights an interesting asymmetry with competition negatively affecting the wage, but not the employment, prospects of unionized workers and the employment, but not the wage, prospects of nonunion workers.