The Size of the Union Membership Wage Premium in Britain’s Private Sector

The paper estimates the union wage premium in Britain’s private sector in 1998, after nearly two decades of union decline. It examines the performance of the linear estimator alongside a semi-parametric technique (propensity score matching (PSM)) – hitherto unused in the wage premium literature - which shares the same identifying assumption, namely that selection into membership is captured with observable data. Results using the two techniques are compared, and reasons for differences in results are identified and discussed. By altering the information set entering estimation the paper shows the sensitivity of OLS and PSM results to data quality.

In brief: Men in black: the impact of new contracts on football referees' performance

In the 2001/02 English football season, referees of Premier League matches were paid a salary for the first time. Alex Bryson and colleagues investigate the impact on their performance.salary contracts, performance relate pay

Union Effects On Managerial and Employee Perceptions of Employee Relations in Britain

This paper uses matched employer-employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) to estimate influences on managerial and employee perceptions of the employee relations climate. Both the strength and direction of union effects differ according to the nature of the union and employer responses to it. Employee and employer perceptions of climate differ according to the strength of the union, bargaining arrangements adopted, and managerial attitudes to union membership. Employees' perceptions of climate are also strongly associated with employees' perceptions of union effectiveness.Trades unions, industrial relations climate, employee relations, matched employer-employee data

Union Free-Riding in Britain and New Zealand

The percentage of workers who choose not to join the union available to them at their workplace has been rising in Britain and New Zealand. Social custom, union instrumentality, the fixed costs of joining, employee perceptions of management attitudes to unionization and employee problems at work all influence the propensity to free-ride. Ideological convictions regarding the role of unions also play some role, as do private excludable goods. There is little indication of employer-inspired policies substituting for unionization where unions are already present. Having accounted for all these factors, free-riding remains more common in New Zealand than in Britain.Free-riding, trade union, New Zealand, Britain

Working with Dinosaurs? Union Effectiveness in Delivering for Employees

This paper considers the meaning of union effectiveness and identifies features of union structure and behaviour that are correlated with employee perceptions of union effectiveness in delivering improved work and working conditions. There are strong links between unions’ organisational effectiveness and employee perceptions of whether they are effective in achieving fair pay, promoting equal opportunities, protecting workers, making work interesting and enjoyable, and working with management to increase quality and productivity.

The Union Membership Wage Premium: An Analysis Using Propensity Score Matching

This paper estimates the size of the union membership wage premium by comparing wage outcomes for unionised workers with 'matched' non-unionised workers. The method assumes selection on observables. For this identifying assumption to be plausible, one must be able to control for all characteristics affecting both union status and wages. This requires very informative data. We illustrate the value of the rich data offered by the linked employer-employee Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS) 1998 in implementing this methodology. We estimate the union membership premium for the whole private sector, among workers in workplaces where at least some workers are covered by collective bargaining, and in occupations with pay set by collective bargaining. We find a raw 17-25% union premium in gross hourly wages for the private sector in Britain, depending on the sub-group used. However, post-matching this difference falls to between 3% and 6%. This indicates that the higher pay of unionised workers is largely accounted for by their better underlying earnings capacity, which is associated with their individual characteristics, the jobs they do and the workplaces they find themselves in.trade unions, wage premium, treatment effect, matching, propensity score

Why have workers stopped joining unions? The rise in never-membership in Britain

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (‘never-member’) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member, rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members, that is behind the decline in overall union membership in Britain. We estimate the determinants of ‘never-membership’ and consider how much of the rise can be explained by structural change in the labour market and how much by change in preferences among employees