The compensation of national union presidents: Moderating effects of union size

Over the last forty years numerous reseachers from the fields of economics, finance, and human resources management have proposed and empirically evaluated a number of models in efforts to identify determinants of executive compensation. Recently, similar research efforts have been undertaken to identify compensation determinants for union officers, both at the local and national levels. As an extension of these works, this study found measures of union financial strength, job complexity, performance and tenure in office to be directly related to national union presidents’ compensation. Although union income and relative union member earnings were the strongest determinants of officer compensation for the sample of unions as a whole, analyses of three subgroups of unions based on size revealed very different findings for large as opposed to small and medium-sized unions.     

The political influence of unions and corporations on COPE votes in the U.S. senate, 1979–1988

The political influence of unions and corporations is examined by analyzing Senate roll-call votes on COPE-identified legislation for the period 1979–1988. Union PAC contributions and union membership both have significant positive effects on three different types of COPE legislation: Narrow Union, General Labor, and Non-Labor. In addition, corporate PAC contributions to senators’ opponents reduce their pro-union voting behavior on Narrow Union and General Labor bills. There is no evidence that the political influence of unions in the U.S. is declining.     

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.     

Union decline: A view from Canada

Important changes are occurring in the Canadian unions’ political and economic environments. This paper argues that such changes may be detrimental to Canadian trade unions, given their structural and institutional situation. To support this argument, private-sector union and nonunion firms in Alberta are compared. This comparison uncovers some structural (union members’ employment patterns and union firm characteristics) and institutional (union services) attributes of unions. Combined with the politico-economic environments that Alberta unions have faced since the early 1980s, these attributes have led to a decline in union membership. Because these attributes are shared by many other Canadian unions, those unions may increasingly confront some of the same hardships currently plaguing their Alberta counterparts. I am indebted to Brian Bemmels, Alan Murray, and John G. Fricke for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to Mike Jones for his research assistance.     

Union wealth: The bargaining power implications

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. unions are in crisis. Recently, however, unions have shown both boldness and initiative, remarkably in the proposed merger between the Auto Workers, Steelworkers, and Machinists. Regardless of whether labor is genuinely on the rebound, unions need money in order to retain clout and expand. I explore the financial wealth of the 28 largest U.S.-based unions during the period 1979–1993, and find that these unions, overall, maintained their wealth during a period of substantial membership decline even after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, however, unions vary widely in terms of both their wealth and related trends over the past decade and a half, but wealth has nonetheless remained substantially concentrated among a small set. Yet, several unions possess a seemingly robust financial capacity to sustain a strike, and the pursuit of additional union consolidations might reinforce this capacity. These consolidations may also have political implications.     

The (Parlous) State of German Unions

We trace the profound decline in German unionism over the course of the last three decades. Today, just one in five workers is a union member, and whether this degree of penetration is consistent with a corporatist model built on encompassing unions is now moot. The decline in union membership and density is attributable to external forces that have confronted unions in many countries (such as globalization and compositional changes in the workforce), to some specifically German considerations (such as the transition process in post-communist Eastern Germany), and to sustained intervals of classic insider behavior on the part of German unions. The "correctives" have included mergers between unions, decentralization, and wages that are more responsive to unemployment. At issue is the success of these innovations. For instance, the trend toward decentralization in collective bargaining hinges in part on the health of that other pillar of the dual system of industrial relations, the works council. But works council coverage has also declined, leading some observers to equate decentralization with deregulation. While this conclusion is likely too radical, German unions are at the crossroads. We argue that if they fail to define what they stand for, are unable to increase their presence at the workplace, and continue to lack convincing strategies to deal with contemporary economic and political trends working against them, their decline may become a rout.     

The Mixed Fortunes of Irish Unions: Living with the Paradoxes of Social Partnership

We assess the fortunes of Irish unions since 1980 and, in particular, focus on the period of national social partnership since 1987. We argue that, structurally, unions have been weakened by a sharp decline in union density levels. In addition, labor law reform has not been as permissive as unions desired. However, on the other hand, we highlight that union membership in Ireland has never been higher and unions exert a strong influence over many areas of government policy. In conclusion, we argue that continuing with social partnership is the most viable option for Irish unions, though significant gains in union power are unlikely to happen.     

Union presence and executive compensation: An exploratory study

While executive compensation has historically attracted considerable attention and controversy, this issue is becoming increasingly more contentious as organizations attempt to cut labor costs through reengineering and downsizing. Unions, governments, and workers are becoming critical of seemingly excessive executive compensation while employees are asked to make concessions. In fact, many labor organizations are specif-ically targeting executive compensation for criticisms: Witness their web sites tracking executive pay and numerous press releases and public statements. However, do unions, through their presence in a firm, affect executive compensation? While there is con-siderable research on the determinants and correlates of executive compensation, the literature is silent on the role of unions. We investigate the distinctive effects of union presence with data on a sample of Canadianbased metalmining firms. The differences between union and nonunion firms, as well as the unique effects of union presence, are analyzed and future research suggested.     

The impact of labor unions on the passage of economic legislation

This paper examines the political power of labor unions. A model of the decision of an interest group to contribute to a political campaign is developed and tested. The empirical evidence indicates that interest groups, and unions in particular, use political contributions in a systematic and coordinated manner. Unions give money to candidates with relatively little seniority (who might otherwise not be elected) and to candidates from districts with about the average number of union members. Such candidates might otherwise not vote as the union would desire. The influence of campaign contributions and of union membership on the voting of congressmen on issues of interest to unions is also investigated. Union membership is sometimes significant and campaign contributions are always significant in explaining voting on minimum wages, wageprice controls, benefits for strikers, and OSHA and CETA appropriations. The indirect economic effects of labor unions — those effects which occur because unions influence legislation — may be as important as the direct effects which occur through collective bargaining.     

Judging unions’ future using a historical perspective: the public policy choice between competition and unionization

VII. Conclusion In discussing the future of private sector union membership one needs to evaluate the early period of union ascendancy (1930s through the early 1950s) as well as the past few decades when unions have been in decline. We know trends currently in place are unfavorable to unions. What conditions would be favorable? When the earlier period of union growth us studied, two factors become prominent — the competitiveness of the labor market and the ability of unions to fullfill their major goal of either extracting economic rents or remedying market failures that result in exploitive employment relationship.     

The Political and Civic Lives of Public Sector Workers: Unions and “Public Service Motivation”*

Public sector employees are highly engaged in civic and political life, from voting to volunteering. Scholars have theorized that this political activity stems from “public service motivation,” or the selection of publicly oriented individuals into public work. We build on this work by analyzing the role of public sector unions in shaping participation. Unions are central mobilizing organizations in political life, and one in three public sector workers are unionized. Special supplements of the Current Population Survey provide data on various forms of participation, sector, union membership, and union coverage. Logistic regressions find that unionized public sector workers have much higher odds of engaging in a range of activities compared to non‐union public workers, including protest, electoral politics, and political communication. Union membership impacts service work to a lesser extent, suggesting that unions are more central to political lives. These findings have implications for the consequences of union decline, including the class, race, and gender composition of who participates in democratic life.     

Union legislative records during president reagan’s first term

It has been assumed that organized labor’s political record has declined markedly since President Reagan was elected in 1980. This study shows this contention to be only partly true. While organized labor’s political influence has declined somewhat, particularly in the executive branch, there is considerable variation in the legislative agendas, objectives, and successes across a sample of eight major unions studied. This suggests that union legislative activity should be studied on a union-by-union basis. The authors are indebted to the many union lobbyists who agreed to be interviewed as a part of this study, and to Jack Fiorito, Donna Sockell, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This study was partially funded by a Columbia University Graduate School of Business Faculty Research Fellowship.     

Labor Union Political Strategy in an Era of Decline and Revitalization

U.S. labor unions faced sharp membership losses over the last few decades, and some responded by ushering in a new, revitalized model of organizing. Yet we know little about how these forces may be shaping the political activities of the labor movement. Has crisis prompted unions to take aim at public policies inhibiting union vitality, or have unions turned outward to embrace broader social causes? This paper uses an original dataset of union appearances in congressional hearings to analyze unions’ legislative advocacy activities. Findings suggest substantial differences between those unions that are likely to appear in hearings on core labor‐related topics and those that appear in hearings on broad social issues: AFL‐CIO unions are more likely to participate in hearings on core labor issues, while unions commonly cited as “revitalized” and public sector unions are more likely to appear in hearings on broad social issues.     

Labor’s love lost? Changes in the U.S. environment and declining private sector unionism

Conclusion Changes in the demographics of the work force and structural changes in the economy have played a key role in declining union membership over time. Since these trends are anticipated to continue into the future, union attempts to stem the decline must accept these changes as given and adapt in ways that allow membership to grow even as these shifts occur. Such a fundamental reorientation of priorities will be difficult, but some signs suggest that unions may be taking preliminary steps in this direction. Such change is vital to unions’ survival, both as a social movement and as a political institution. Edward Potter is president of the Employment Policy Foundation and co-author of Keeping America Competitive: Employment Policy for the 21^st Century (1995). He gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Anita Hattiangadi, an EPF senior economist, in the preparation of this paper.     

Sustaining and Developing Women's Trade Union Activism: A Gendered Project?

Against the background of heavy membership decline, the increasing importance of women as a source of members for unions and union efforts to attract women into membership, this paper explores the nature of women's union activism. The focus is on why women stay active in unions. The paper employs Klandermans' model as a framework for examining senior union women's activism. This study suggests that the model is gendered in that women's experiences and perceptions of trade unions are highly gender specific and further that their union activities are underpinned by a feminist paradigm. The women in the study expressed a strong desire to ensure that the union works for women, indicative of the gendered nature of their commitment to the union. They revealed gendered bargaining priorities and thus gendered perceptions of union instrumentality. Their social integration within the union is shown to be highly or partially contingent upon, formal and informal women's support networks.     

Intensity of management resistance: understanding the decline of unionization in the private sector

IX. Conclusions Although Lipset and Katchanovski present many of the major societal and structural causes that have influenced the decline of private sector unions, they have unfortunately omitted a factor that can account for as much as 40 percent of the decline in private sector union membership, i.e., intensity of management opposition. The managerial incentives to stop unionization are formidable because unions raise wages and reduce profits. Economic reasons for American managers to stop unionization have grown as the wage between union and nonunion workers has widened over the past 40 years especially relative to EU nations. In addition, as managerial accountability to shareholders has risen and pay related to performance has grown, top executives have attempted to raise productivity through high-performance workplace practices or lowering real wages. Since many of these practices rely on top-level executives being able to make decisions on personnel quickly without challenges from employees or due process, they have fought unions more vigorously in order to maintain this discretion over workplace decisions. Although this behavior by management may result in a more efficient allocation of resources from both a micro-and macroeconomic perspective, the losses to society occur in terms of greater income inequality and less employee voice at the workplace and in the political arena.     

The effect of type of union on member-nonmember wage differentials

The union-nonunion wage differential can be decomposed into bargaining and membership effects. While some analysts suggest that they are not separable and that bargaining power is a function of membership density, others argue that they are separable and that the former derives from monopoly power while the latter stems from socialization. Our results support the latter view. We derive estimates of bargaining and membership effects for workers covered by national, industrial, and craft union contracts as well as for all covered workers taken together. Since industrial and craft unions differ in structure and organization, we expect differences in the socialization effects among types of unions. It is clear from our results that union membership per se in each case gives a large positive wage advantage.     

Challenging Misconceptions about Organizing Women into Unions

In many countries, women are the fastest growing group of unionized workers. As unions scramble to restore their flagging membership, women become central to the process of union membership renewal. Yet survey data collected from union organizers in Canada show that unions are only partially meeting women’s demand for union representation, in large part because of gender bias in union organizing practices. To develop this argument, this article offers data analysis that challenges four popular misconceptions about women and unions which contribute to gender bias in union organizing practices. These misconceptions are: women are less likely to support unions than men; high rates of unionization in the public sector rather than women themselves explain the high rates of union growth amongst women; small workplaces are a particular barrier to organizing women and women are more passive and avoid conflict, therefore reducing their likelihood of withstanding a hostile organizing drive. Having challenged these misconceptions, the article concludes with a discussion of the many ways in which union organizing practices are gender biased. Issues discussed range from the limited number of women hired as organizers to the tendency of unions to target small male‐dominated workplaces for organizing, over women‐dominated workplaces, in spite of the latter’s greater likelihood of success.     

UNIONS, PLANTS, JOBS, AND WORKERS

The relationship between unions and their members is an important, yet neglected, subject in recent studies of the sociology of work. This study develops and tests a theory of union satisfaction and participation that combines recent research in the sociology of work with previous explanations of union satisfaction and participation provided by industrial relations researchers, in an attempt to understand the relationship between unions, plants, jobs, and workers in U.S. manufacturing industries. This theory predicts that union members will be satisfied with their unions and participate more in them if there are extensive ties between workers, employers, and unions. These ties stem from the focus of labor/management relations in particular, and class struggles in general, on market outcomes and the historical linkage of union membership with employment in the United States. The theory also predicts that unions them-selves act as ties to specific work settings and that union participation is a forum for voicing dissatisfaction with specific characteristics of workers' jobs. Testing these predictions is complicated by contradictory nature of the structure and organization of work in advanced industrial societies. The analysis provides qualified support for this theory, with data drawn from more unions, plants, and union members than have been used to date. In addition to discussing modifications to the theory and analysis presented here, the study includes a discussion of its implications for the future of unionization and the organization of work, in light of declines in union membership, increased efforts to decertify unions and resist union organizing efforts, and deindustrialization in the United States.     

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.