Workers, Unions, and Takeovers

How do takeovers affect workers?? wages and job security in the short-run? What role does the labor union play in mitigating these effects? I answer these two questions by analyzing wage and employment outcomes of over 4,000 public firms that were acquired between 1981 and 2002, using establishment-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. I find that target establishments exhibit a net contraction in wages and employment, relative to comparable establishments after takeovers. Targets?? establishments in more unionized industries experience worse wage and employment outcomes after takeovers. These adverse effects are exacerbated when the establishment is located in a state with Right-to-work laws where unions face a less favorable bargaining environment. These findings indicate that target firms?? employees are negatively affected by takeovers and that their labor unions do not mitigate these negative effects.     

Unions,politics, and protectionism

Conventional models of labor relations emphasize “business unionism,” that is, collective bargaining activities and outcomes. We argue that a more realistic model of behavior incorporates the union’s role as an agent of redistribution that seeks to benefit some members and union leaders primarily at the expense of other members, nonunion employees, and consumers. Union power to redistribute wealth is obtained from the special privileges that labor organizations obtain from government. This paper demonstrates how, as political entities, unions and their employers attempt to secure government-sanctioned wealth transfers through protectionism. The authors gratefully acknowledge research support provided by the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Earhart Foundation.     

Unions,seniority, and public choice

This paper examines the implications of granting a seniority-based system to a union whose behavior is determined by a median voter rule. It is shown that the union will negotiate a sequence of wages that will contract union employment in each period. The model then is extended to include an active role for the firm. It is shown that when the firm has the opportunity to resist unionization, the union will not allow union employment to fall below some lower bound. This lower bound is then a steady-state equilibrium.     

Campaign Activities and Electoral Outcomes in Britain 1979 and 1983

Political broadcasting through the electronic media has largelydisplaced two older methods of influencing voters—canvassingand advertising in the press—as the dominant party campaignactivity during elections. This article utilizes survey datacollected during the 1979 and 1983 British general electionsto estimate the reported effects of these three types of campaignactivity on electoral outcomes. The results show that few votersreport being influenced by canvassing and advertising, and thenet effect on the vote is either small or nonexistent. By contrast,around 1 in 6 report being influenced by a party political broadcast,and those most influenced are eventual Liberal-Alliance voters.The net electoral effect of political broadcasting can rangeas high as 3.4 percent, but gains for the Conservatives andLabour are offset by the political broadcasting of competitors.The main exceptions are the Liberals in 1979 and the Alliancein 1983, who made a net gain of 1.5 percent and 3.3 percentof the vote, respectively.     

Unions,incentive systems,and job design

I model the relationship between incentive systems and job design and how unions influence both. The basic idea is that it is easier to monitor worker effort for jobs designed to be routine and inflexible. Pay based on monitoring is used in this scenario rather than incentive pay based on production. Jobs with worker flexibility and autonomy call for incentives based more on output. Unions typically oppose output-based pay, thus inducing job design change. The empirical work supports this view and shows that incentive pay is much less likely for union workers and unions have a clear negative effect on job characteristics that lead to use of incentive pay. In particular, union jobs are more repetitive, have more measurable criteria, and involve less judgmental criteria and less data analysis.     

Unions,PAC contributions,and the NAFTA vote

Political action committees (PACs), especially those controlled by organized labor and business, have been shown to affect Congressional voting. We explore how PACs influenced the House of Representatives’ vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA vote is analyzed because organized labor strongly opposed the treaty while business generally supported it and because of the straight-forward voting generated by its fast-track status. Probit analysis of a unique, unpublished data set containing information about PAC and non-PAC contributions to the 1992 House election campaigns demonstrates that Representatives who depended largely on labor PACs tended to oppose NAFTA, while Representatives who derived a large proportion of their campaign contributions from business PACs tended to favor its passage.     

Unions,firms, and the return to seniority

Wages generally rise more slowly with experience in union than in nonunion settings. It has been argued that the lower slope of the earnings profiles reflects the preferences of the median worker. It is shown in this paper that the median worker model (assuming a median worker exists) does not lead to a uniformly less steeply sloped earnings profile. Instead, the lower return to seniority reflects the firm’s rational response to the union’s monopoly power. Thus, the lower slope in unionized firms reflects the objectives of firms, not unions, in the bargaining process. I would like to thank Bill Dickens, Bernie Grofman, Shu Kahn, and Donald Martin for useful comments and suggestions.     

State Management, Trade Unions and Politics in Brazil

Abstract The state in Brazil not only built industrial plants in the mid twentieth century, but also established patterns of control and domination over the workers of these companies. State-management purposes were to 'mould' a 'Brazilian worker'for the nation' and to extend control beyond the point of production. Evidence is presented to explain these strategies of domination and to show how the workers built their resistance, both at work or through trade union participation. This is developed into a discussion of the process of politicisation through trade union action in the state companies and the disagreements that arose between militant workers and workers with 'factory consciousness'.     

Unions and wage inequality

Summary and Conclusions The impact of unions on the structure of wages has recently attracted renewed interest as analysts have struggled to explain the rise in earnings inequality in several industrialized countries. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States provide a potentially valuable set of countries for examining this question. All three countries now collect comparable data on wages and union status in their regular labor force surveys. Several features of the collective bargaining institutions of these countries make them suitable for studying the relationship between unions and wage inequality. Bargaining is highly decentralized; there are no general mechanisms for extending collective bargaining provisions beyond the “organized” sector; and the fraction of the work force covered by collective bargaining is relatively modest. Thus it is possible to compare the structure of wages for workers covered by union contracts to those who are not covered, and potentially infer the effect of unions on overall wage inequality.     

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.     

Neglect as Child Protection: the Political Context and the Practical Outcomes

SUMMARY: This paper identifies the central tensions and contradictions in relation to current policies and practices for child neglect. It demonstrates how these arise directly from the political context of the work and how this has changed over recent years. In the process children, their parents and the professionals concerned are left vulnerable and potentially exposed. It concludes by suggesting how we can reframe policy and practice in this area of work and outlines some practical steps that can be taken as a result.     

Unions and private wage supplements

Private wage supplements are an important part of total compensation. A model of workers’ supplement expenditures is developed which shows that, although the expenditure determinants sometimes differ between broad industry/occupation subsamples, earnings, price effects of preferential tax treatment and economies of group purchase, unionization, the product market power of the firm, and worker age are usually significant determinants of supplement expenditures. The firm’s goal of reducing turnover costs as well as demographic, locational, and industry variables also systematically affect supplement expenditures. Supplements usually increase progressively with wages, indicating that often made proportionality assumptions are invalid. This work is based on a portion of my doctoral dissertation “An Economic Analysis of the Determinants of Private Wage Supplements.” An anonymous referee made many useful suggestions and criticisms. The Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University provided some of the computer funding. The remaining errors are my responsibility.