The Impact Of New Unionization On Wages And Working Conditions: A Longitudinal Study Of Establishments Under NLRB Elections

This study investigates the impact of union organization on the wages and labor practices of establishments newly organized in the 1980s using a research design in which establishments are 'paired' with their closest nonunion competitor. There are two major findings. First. unionism had only a modest effect on wages in the newly organized plants, which contrasts sharply with the huge union wage impact found in cross-section comparisons of union and nonunion individuals on Current Population Survey and related data tapes. Second, in contrast co its modest impact on wages, new unionization substantially altered several personnel practices. creating grievance systems, greater seniority protection. and job bidding and posting. That newly organized establishments adopt union working conditions but grant only modest increases in wages suggests that 'collective voice' rather than monopoly wage gains is the key to understanding what unionism does in the economy.

Do Unions Make Enterprises Insolvent?

This study investigates the impact of unionization and firm, business line, or establishment survival. A consistent empirical finding is that unions raise wages above those found in nonunion firms, and that in a competitive product market one would expect to find that unionized firms would go out of business more than nonunion firms. However, if unions engage in economic rent-sharing, then during periods of economic hardship unionized firms may be able to remain solvent by giving back some of these rents. In order to answer this question we analyze three data sets: a data set on the union status of solvent and insolvent enterprises and business lines from the Compustat files, a data set on the union status of workers who have lost their jobs due to permanent plant closures or business failures obtained by matching files from Current Population Survey, and a data set from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service on the outcomes of elections won by unions and on the outcomes of labor- management dispute cases. Overall, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that unions behave in an economically rational manner, pushing wages to the point where union firms may expand less rapidly than nonunion firms, but not to the point where the firm, plant, or business line closes down.

Employer Behavior in the Face of Union Organizing Drives

The direct role of employers in union organizing has long been a neglected part of the union organizing literature. In this study we examine the determinants and consequences of employer behavior when faced with an organizing drive. Our principal substantive findings are: - that there is a substitution between high wages/benefits/good work conditions/supervisory practices and "tough" management opposition to unionism. - that a high innate propensity for a union victory deters management opposition, while some indicators of a low propensity also reduce opposition. - that "positive industrial relations" raise the chances the firm will defeat the union in an election, as does bringing in consultants and having supervisors campaign intensely against the union. - that the careers of managers whose wages/supervisory practices/ benefits lead to union organizing drives, much less to union victories, suffer as a result. In general we interpret our results as consistent with the notion that firms behave in a profit maximizing manner in opposing an organizing drive and with the basic proposition that management opposition, reflected in diverse forms of behavior, is a key component in the on-going decline in private sector unionism in the United States.

Adoption and Termination of Employee Involvement Programs

This study uses a 10-year longitudinal database on U.S. manufacturing establishments to analyze the dynamics of the adoption and termination of employee involvement programs (EI). We show that firms' use of EI has not grown continuously, but rather introduce and terminate EI policies in ways that imply that the policies are complementary with each other and with other advanced human resource practices, seemingly moving toward an equilibrium distribution of EI policies. Using a Markov model, we estimate the long-run distribution of the number of EI programs in firms and find that adjustment to the steady-state distribution takes about 20 years.

THE IMPACT OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY ON FACULTY PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR INSTRUCTIONAL ROLES

The classroom is a dynamic social space. When faculty members and students enter that space for purposes of teaching and learning in a racially and ethnically diverse context, there are many actors that come into full participation: faculty members, students, the curriculum, cultural and ethnic diversity, challenges associated with racial and ethnic diversity such as culturally-based learning styles, prejudices and stereotypes, expectations between faculty and students, among other things. The extent to which faculty members are effective in conducting their instructional roles is impacted by their awareness of the classroom dynamic, the opportunities and challenges it provides for teaching and learning, and how adequately they are prepared to overcome the effects of the challenges and optimize the teaching and learning opportunities. This dissertation set out to explore, using faculty experience (in number of years), how culturally-based learning styles/preferences impacted faculty instructional roles: how faculty perceived their roles, their choice and use of course content, and their choice and use of teaching and evaluation methods. To gather such data, forty out of seventy faculty members teaching in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse higher education institutions in the continental United States responded to a survey, and fifteen were interviewed. The result shows that while teaching experience is important to understanding a classroom context, in the racially and ethnically diverse classroom, numbers are not an adequate measure of experience. Experience involves understanding and adequately responding to the racially and ethnically diverse classroom. It consists of intellectual, personal, and relational dimensions. To acquire these, faculty must be committed to acquiring self-knowledge first, and then understanding their need to develop sensibilities for understanding and interacting with race and ethnicity. This yields credibility with students and, eventually, instructional effectiveness. Except for a few instances, years of teaching experience in the racially and ethnically diverse classroom did not have direct affect on how faculty perceived and performed their instructional roles, and faculty preferred to view their commitment to racial and ethnic diversity as a better measure of experience rather than the number of years they have taught in such contexts