Union membership,market structure,and the innovation output of large and small firms

The determinants of the extent of union membership, industry concentration, and the innovation output of large firms and small firms are examined in a simultaneous-equations model. Data for 246 U.S. manufacturing industries are used to determine: (1) that there are significant interdependencies among these endogenous variables; (2) that contrary to recent findings, unionization is significantly lower in industries with high concentration and high innovation output; and (3) that although high unionization modestly reduces small-firm innovation output (as compared with large-firm innovation output), there is not a large difference in the effects of small-firm and large-firm innovation output on the extent of union membership across industries. I am grateful to John W. Ballantine for his comments on this study.     

Local union leaders’ satisfaction with grievance procedures

We develop a model of local union leaders’ satisfaction with their grievance proce-dures drawing from the job characteristics model and agency theory. The model is tested with OLS regression and LISREL estimates based on a survey of local union leaders in British Columbia. Results show that local union leaders are more satisfied with their grievance procedures when local officials have more autonomy in decision making; their local size is smaller; the grievance filing rate is low; grievance issues are perceived as important; the grievance resolution rate is high; a greater propor-tion of grievances are settled in the early steps; and the union success rate is high. In addition, grievance procedure satisfaction is multifaceted and each facet has its own unique variance and a different combination of significant predictors. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We thank Dev Jennings for his helpful comments on an earlier version.     

Labor union effects on innovative activity

Union rent-seeking is considered a tax on firm returns from investments in innovative activity. We examine this proposition by considering the responses of firms in a 1985 survey on R&D and product innovation. Consistent with our model, we find that innovative activity is significantly less important for union than for similar nonunion firms. We conclude that innovative activity may be an important route through which union rent-seeking affects the long-run performance of firms. We appreciate the helpful assistance and suggestions received from our colleague Terry Seaks, Barry Bozeman at Syracuse University, and participants in the Vanderbilt Microeconomics Workshop.     

Challenges to professionalism and union voting intentions: The case of pharmacists

Using data from a national survey of pharmacists who are members of the American Pharmaceutical Association, we examine the union voting intentions of employee pharmacists. We find that union instrumentality regarding professionalism is a primary predictor of union voting intent among these employees. In addition, this predictor mediates the relationship between the level of professionalism at a pharmacist’s current employment situation and his or her expected union vote. Also important to union voting intent are respondent beliefs about union instrumentality regarding pecuniary issues, prior union experience, as well as overall job satisfaction. Implications for employers, unions, and researchers are drawn. We thank Mary Graham, Jann Skelton, Paul Swiercz, Terry Thomason, and participants at the Seventh Bar-gaining Group Conference at Michigan State University for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was made possible by a grant from the American Pharmaceutical Association.     

Union density effects in the supermarket industry

Unions provide higher than competitive wages for members, but their effect on non-union wages is not clear. We investigate the effect of union density on supermarket wages from 1986 to 1993, a period of declining real wages and declining union membership. Full-information maximum likelihood techniques are used to estimate log wage equations for both the union and nonunion sectors. Decomposition techniques then separate the union wage premium into the relative effects of densities and union membership. We find a significant, positive effect of union density for both union and nonunion employees. This effect explains approximately one-third of the union-nonunion wage differential. This research was conducted while Johansson was a graduate research assistant at the University of Minnesota.     

The influence of technological opportunity on union membership in U.S. manufacturing industries

I examine influences of technological opportunity on a set of factors determining inter-industry variation in union membership density. A data set of 239 U.S. manufacturing industries is divided into subsets of “technologically progressive “ and “technologically unprogressive “ industries, and my unionization model is estimated for each subset. The study confirms recent findings indicating that innovation activity and industry concentration have significant negative effects on union membership density. However, these results are obtained only for the subset of “technologically progressive industries and not for the “technologically unprogressive “ industries. These findings suggest that estimation bias is imparted to interindustry studies of the extent of union membership through the influence of technological opportunity on the interrelationships between innovation output, industry concentration, and union membership density. I am grateful for the support of the Center for Technology Management Research at Stevens.     

Union rent seeking and import competition

conclusion We empirically evaluate two issues: (1) how the union rent seeking responds to import competition and (2) whether union bargaining power, as proxied by the proportion of the labor force in an industry that is unionized, moderates the impact of import com-petition on union wage differentials. Unlike other studies, our emphasis is on the influ-ence of import competition on union rent seeking, rather than on union wages per se. Our primary results indicate that while import competition negatively and significantly affects union rent seeking, the extent of unionization does not substantially influence the impact of import competition on the union wage differentials. This is a somewhat surprising result since the literature suggests that union wages are greater in the pres-ence of stronger unions.     

A model of monopoly and “efficient” unions with endogenous union coverage: Positive and normative implications

We present a model of a rent-maximizing union that organizes to increase its coverage of an industry and analyze monopoly and “efficient” unions in this setting. Our model is unique in that we allow for a competitive industry with free entry and find union and nonunion firms coexisting with product market equilibrium. This is achieved by incorporating the insight that firms are heterogeneous in productive characteristics. An important implication of our model is that an “efficient” union that covers a nontrivial share of the market is not efficient and may in fact be less efficient than a monopoly union.     

Local Union Leaders'' Satisfaction with Grievance Procedures

We develop a model of local union leaders' satisfaction with their grievance procedures drawing from the job characteristics model and agency theory. The model is tested with OLS regression and LISREL estimates based on a survey of local union leaders in British Columbia. Results show that local union leaders are more satisfied with their grievance procedures when local officials have more autonomy in decision making; their local size is smaller; the grievance filing rate is low; grievance issues are perceived as important; the grievance resolution rate is high; a greater proportion of grievances are settled in the early steps; and the union success rate is high. In addition, grievance procedure satisfaction is multi-faceted and each facet has its own unique variance and a different combination of significant predictors.     

Beards and Bloomers: Flight Attendants,Grievances and Embodied Labour in the Canadian Airline Industry, 1960s–1980s

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30‐year period. Taking a historical, materialist‐feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.     

Outsourcing and union power

The outsourcing of union work and jobs either diffuses or diminishes union membership, depending on perspective and situation. The correlation of trends in union membership to trends in union power, while less than perfect, has until recently been relatively strong over the past sixteen years. The fact that as diverse a sample of unions as AFSCME, SEIU, and UAW have chosen to make outsourcing a prominent labor/public relations issue suggests that the correlation continues to be perceived by the union movement to be significant, notwithstanding the efforts of the “new” leadership of the AFL-CIO to break that link with respect to union political power by “taxing” member unions and their members to contribute both money and militancy to the 1996 election cycle. Although outsourcing may lead only to the diffusion of union membership either within or between unions, as opposed to the diminution of union membership, this fact has not received a great deal of attention. The net effect on total union membership of outsourcing from one union employer to another union employer is unclear, although the effect on the membership of the union at the outsourcing employer is not. The redistribution of membership within a union as a result of outsourcing is likely to have little immediate impact on union power. However, as even the best case scenario presented above suggests, it may have significant long-run deleterious effects on union bargaining power by taking labor out of a sheltered market and putting it into potentially competitive market. This is particularly likely to be the case when outsourcing (1) places the outsourced work into a different industry or wage contour and (2) creates the possibility of moving from sole-source to multiplesource supplier arrangements. The redistribution of membership between unions as a result of outsourcing is unlikely to have a major impact on union power broadly defined. It can have, however, serious deleterious effects in terms of the power of an individual union, as suggested in my “competitive case” scenario. The fact that one union’s losses due to outsourcing may be another union’s gain is of little consolation to the losing union. That act, in and of itself, may make the threat of outsourcing a potential union “Achilles heel” at the bargaining table by placing it into competition with some other, perhaps unknown, union as well as possibly nonunion competition. The most obvious threat to union power comes from outsourcing that diminishes union membership overall by transferring jobs from union to nonunion employers. The willingness and ability of employers to move work/jobs entirely out of the orbit of union control constitutes, in terms of power and particularly union bargaining power, a revisitation of the phenomenon of the “runaway shop.” It may also be viewed as a proactive form of hiring permanent replacements for (potentially) striking workers. The union options in dealing with such a challenge are to endeavor to preclude outsourcing through legislation or collective bargaining or to chase the work by organizing the unorganized, hopefully with the help of the unionized outsourcing employer. Neither option may be easy, but as the 1996 auto industry negotiations suggest, the former may be less difficult than the latter. The possibility that outsourcing from union to nonunion employer may provide unions with the power to organize from the top (outsourcer) down (outsourcee) cannot be entirely ignored as the issue of supplier “neutrality” reportedly was raised in the 1996 auto negotiations. The adverse effects of outsourcing on union political and financial power, by virtue of its impact on the level or distribution of union membership, can and may well be offset by an increase in union activism—as measured by dues levels, merger activity, organizing commitment, and political action. The adverse effects of outsourcing on union bargaining power are more problematical from the union standpoint. The effect of outsourcing, whatever its rationale or scenario, appears to be to put union labor back into competition. Thus, outsourcing constitutes yet another challenge to the labor movement in its ongoing and seemingly increasingly unsuccessful battle to take and keep U.S. union labor out of competition by proving itself able and willing to organize to the extent of the market and standardizing wages in that market.     

Women Working in a Greedy Institution: Commitment and Emotional Labour in the Union Movement

This paper seeks to move beyond the restrictions of limited representations of women's participation in the union movement. Through a focus on the union movement as a ‘greedy institution’, it is argued that women's union involvement requires complex and dynamic negotiations with its gendered discourses and practices. As a greedy institution, the union movement demands considerable depth of commitment and loyalty, as well as high levels of work and emotional labour. Based on a study of a network of women union officials, this paper discusses the ways women interpret three main aspects of trade union work: commitment, workload and emotional labour. I argue that the strategies the women officials employ do not remain static within a limited frame of gender difference from men. Rather, they must engage with the effects of male dominance of the union movement as well as the difficulties associated with union activism, family, service to members, leadership, and care in order to take up the political opportunities available in this greedy institution.     

Vertical spillovers,market concentration,union coverage,and wages

This paper outlines a model that tests for the presence of spillover effects of union coverage across industry boundaries on wages and union coverage in vertically related industries. There is some evidence of spillover effects from buying industries to the wages of nonunion workers and of such effects on the degree of union coverage from both buying and supplying industries. We are grateful to Dan Hamermesh and an anonymous referee for useful comments. Responsibility for errors is our own.     

Trade union pedagogy and cross‐border action

In this article, we examine the potential of global union pedagogy to address the structural and political challenges of cross‐border trade‐union action. We do so by proposing an analytical framework that draws on labour relations, political sociology and education to explain educational processes and outcomes as responses to the pitfalls of global labour campaigns and the inadequacy of global and local labour institutions. We proceed to assess the value of our framework by elaborating on its different dimensions – framing, synthesizing, connecting and regenerating – in relation to the educational work of a global union federation, namely the International Transport Workers' Federation. We find that an actor‐centred approach that combines top–down, bottom–up as and horizontal processes of collecting knowledge from different contexts and making links between different countries, industries and parts of supply chains can help actors realize that their seemingly diverse concerns are essentially different manifestations of the same problem.     

The Ross-Dunlop debate and union wage concessions: A median voter analysis

The Ross-Dunlop debate concerns the extent to which unions take into account the trade-off between wages and employment in formulating their wage demands. This paper develops a median voter model of union behavior that offers a new approach to resolving the Ross-Dunlop debate. The model shows that when the binding constraint on the median union member in the seniority distribution is the threat of layoff, the union will behave as a “Dunlop-type” union; when the binding constraint is the cost of striking, the union will behave as a “Ross-type” union. The model is then applied to the related issue of union wage concessions. Two questions are examined: Under what conditions will a union agree to wage concessions? How large a cut in wages will be accepted?     

A utility-production model of union behavior

This paper expands the scope of the economic analysis of unions by presenting a model that is unusually general with regard to both union leadership objectives and the constraints placed on their behavior and by applying this model to a wide-ranging set of political and economic issues regarding unions. The model assumes that union leadership maximizes an objective function containing both political and economic goals and is constrained by the membership and the firm, as well as by a set of technological constraints. The latter constraints are based on the assumption that union power can be modeled as a partially exogenous production process. After defining the Lagrangian and first-order conditions, the model is compared to previous models of leadership objectives and applied to the analysis of union wage concessions and internal union democracy. The comments of Sinan Koont, Donald R. Williams, Jean-Jacques Rosa, Scott Dennis, and anonymous referees on earlier drafts are greatly appreciated. Remaining errors, of course, are my own.     

Organizational innovations,human resources and firm performance: The Emilia-Romagna food sector

This paper studies the relationship between organizational innovation, industrial relations and economic performance at the firm level. It adopts an applied perspective by means of a comprehensive survey on a specific industrial sector, the food industry, with the aim of investigating: (i) the degree of organizational innovation and the diffusion of HRM practices; (ii) the relevance of the interaction between unions and top management in the process of decision-making at an operative, organizational and strategic level; (iii) the relations between the intensity of organizational innovation and the quality of industrial relations; (iv) the effects of organizational changes on firm performance.The focus is on firms with bargaining activity at establishment level where worker committees exist. The dataset is derived from a structured questionnaire submitted to union members concerning structural data on firms and local productive units, production flexibility, organizational models, compensation systems, industrial relations and firm performance.The quantitative analysis highlights the following critical elements.First, the firm governance seems characterized by a strong relevance of industrial relations, in terms of “good quality atmosphere” and “involvement of worker representatives and employees”: their action proves to be a stimulus to organizational changes. The set of industrial relations variables does emerge as a significant factor explaining firm innovation intensity.Second, although we cannot ascertain the causal link given the cross-sectional nature of data, firm performance and organizational innovations arise as two elements which are strictly and positively related to each other.Third, the evidence points out that good industrial relations are important as far as the firm performance is concerned; nevertheless their role is mediated by their effects on organizational changes rather than having a direct impact on performance.     

Managerial Hostility and Attitudes Towards Unions: A Canada-US Comparison

We use a cross-country survey of attitudes toward work and unions, which includes a sample of managers in both the US and Canada, to explore whether there is greater attitudinal hostility to unions in the U.S. Our estimates indicate that American manager’s attitudes towards unions are, perhaps surprisingly, less hostile than those of Canadian managers. We explain this first finding by the differential effect of perceived union power, which is greater in Canada than the US and which is correlated negatively with union approval. We also find that US managers are less likely to use extreme methods to oppose union organizing drives, implying that the lower union rates in the US as compared to Canada are not likely the result of greater negativity towards unions themselves but rather some other factor or combination of factors. The implication is that if Canadian managers faced the same labor relations playing field as their US counterparts, they would likely find it easier to thwart union certification drives as well. Alternatively stated, Canadian-style labor relations reforms (such as card-check systems or quicker certification votes) could perhaps tip the balance in favor of unions when organizing in the US.     

Culture,Context, or Conflict? Analyzing Union Attitudes in Six Rural Counties in Conservative Right‐to‐Work States

This study fills an important gap in the literature by analyzing the predictors of union attitude formation in rural, conservative, right‐to‐work states. Drawing on a survey of all licensed electrical workers in six counties in northern Utah and southern Idaho, we analyzed the impact of cultural orientation, job context, and perceived risk on union attitudes. We find that a conservative cultural orientation does not significantly predict union attitudes but job context and perceived risks of union activity do. Dissatisfaction with current working conditions and the belief that employers will oppose and retaliate against workers engaged in union activity significantly predict positive union attitudes. We consider the implications of these findings for scholarship on union attitude formation and for union organizing strategies in rural, conservative right‐to‐work contexts.