How Successful Have Trade Unions Been? A Utility-Based Indicator of Union Well-Being

Can conventional economic analysis help in defining and measuring the success of labor unions? In this paper, a general indicator of union welfare is proposed and particular expressions for the wage and employment objectives of unions are rearranged to derive measures of union success or welfare. These indicators combine two measures: union density and the relative union-nonunion wage gap. The indicators are applied to describe the movement of union welfare in the United States over the past eighty years, the differences in union success among groups of U.S. workers, and the variation in union well-being across countries.relative wage effect of unionism, union density, trade unions, union objectives

An Essay on Real Wage Index Numbers

Real wage index numbers have been used to measure movements in the standard of living of the typical worker. This paper describes some of these indicators for the United States and England. A new real wage index is proposed that resembles the sliding scale used to adjust wages in certain industries years ago. This new index is applied to U.S. manufacturing industry and it suggests a fall in real wages by about 40 percent since 1960. Workers’ distributional position in U.S. manufacturing has deteriorated considerably.index numbers, real wages, sliding scale

The Effects of Incomes Policies on the Frequency and Size of Wage Changes

Along with house rents, wages have frequently been described as the "stickiest" prices in the economy, rarely adjusted more than once a year. Because of this stickiness (which arises from the transactions costs involved in changing wages), a distinction exists between the adjustment of wages and the size of that adjustment. This distinction has important implications for empirical investigations of the determinants of aggregate money wage changes because the equations fitted in these studies are almost invariably plagued with aggregation bias unless the non-synchronous pattern of wage settlements in different sectors of the economy is taken into account. This is a particularly relevant issue when evaluating the effectiveness of incomes policies since some policies have operated by postponing the implementation of new wage settlements (in which case they are directed towards the occurrence of the event) while other policies have taken the form of specifying a permissible ceiling on wage increases (in which case they are designed to affect the extent of occurrence of the event, but not its occurrence). One purpose of this paper is to reevaluate the effectiveness of incomes policies by making use of information from one industry both on the frequency of wage settlements and on the size of wage changes when a settlement takes place. Our empirical work leads us to conjecture whether the apparent "statistical significance" reported by researchers with respect to the performance of variables in models of aggregate wage changes reflects primarily the effects of these variables on the probability of wages being adjusted rather than the effects on the magnitude of wage changes conditional upon wages being adjusted.

The Trade-Off between Wages and Employment in Trade Union Objectives

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to a widely-held opinion, the determination of the goals of unions is fully amenable to empirical analysis. A characterization of the wage and employment-setting process in unionized markets is adopted and its qualitative implications examined. The first-order condition for this model is fitted to time- series data on the newspaper industry from ten cities. The Inter- national Typographical Union 's objective function reveals very restricted opportunities for substituting wages for employment in response to a change in the slope of the employer's labor demand function. Larger union locals place greater emphasis on wages versus employment than smaller union locals.

Employment, Wages, and Unionism in a Model of the Aggregate Labor Market in Britain

Two propositions figure prominently in explanations for Britain's comparatively low growth in employment: first, the wage-setting mechanism is insufficiently responsive to the growth of unemployment and, second, there exists a well-defined negative causal relationship from wages to employment with the features of a conventional labor demand function. Using aggregate annual observations from 1953 to 1979, find the evidence for a conventional labor demand curve to be fragile and find little support for the notion that trade union objectives are unaffected by unemployment as some versions of the "insider-outsider" hypothesis would maintain. In general, the empirical results in this paper emphasize that confident inferences about Britain's employment record cannot be drawn from aggregate data.

A Reconsideration of the Effects of Unionism on Relative Wages and Employment in the United States, 1920-80

H. Gregg Lewis' estimates of the relative wage effect of unionism between 1920 and 1958 are routinely cited though they have rarely been subject to scrutiny. This paper extends Lewis' data to 1980 and, in particular, we construct a series on union membership that links up with the data available in the 1970's from the Current Population Surveys. We proceed to reexamine the effects of trade unions both on relative wages and on relative man hours worked.Our estimates of the relative wage effect are similar to Lewis' though these are not measured with precision and a wide range of estimates are consistent with the results. With respect to the effect of unionism on relative man hours worked, we are not at all satisfied that the analysis of these data clearly points to the existence of a negative effect.

The Surprising Retreat of Union Britain

After expanding in the 1970s, unionism in Britain contracted substantially over the next two decades. This paper argues that the statutory reforms in the 1980s and 1990s were of less consequence in accounting for the decline of unionism than the withdrawal of the state's indirect support for collective bargaining. The principal goal of the reforms was to boost productivity so the paper examines the link between unions and productivity finding only a small association by the end of the 1990s. Private sector unionism has become highly decentralized which renders it vulnerable to the vagaries of market forces.