Unions and environmental regulation

Several logical reasons for union support of environmental regulation suggest union memberships will be larger where expenditures on environmental control are larger. If the relative cost of labor is reduced when additional capital is required to produce a unit of output and if the larger interests of union members and some of the interests of firms can be satisfied by environmental regulation, empirical evidence of those effects should be available. Two statistical tests reported in this paper support the hypothesis that unions will demand certain amounts and forms of environmental regulation. The author expresses appreciation to Fred Amobi for assistance in data collection and to John Warner for helpful comments and criticisms.