The Changing Skill Content of Private Sector Union Coverage

Samuel Dodini, Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willén ()

No 31576, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Concurrent with the precipitous decline in private sector unionization over the past half century, there has been a shift in the type of work covered by unions. We take a skill-based approach to studying this shift, using data from the Current Population Survey combined with occupation-specific task requirements from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the Occupational Information Network. We partition skills into four groups based on two dimensions of task requirements: non-routine cognitive, non-routine manual, routine cognitive, and routine manual. For both men and women, private sector unionized jobs have changed to require more non-routine, cognitive skills and for women, less routine/manual skills. Union, non-union skill differences have grown, with unionized jobs requiring relatively more non-routine cognitive skill for both groups but also relatively more routine skills. We decompose these skill changes into: (1) changes in skills within an occupation, (2) changes in worker concentration across existing occupations, and (3) changes to the occupational mix from entry and exit. Most of the skill changes we document are driven by the second two forces. Finally, we discuss how this evidence can be reconciled with a model of skill-biased technological change that explicitly accounts for the institutional framework surrounding collective bargaining.

JEL-codes: J24 J5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31576.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Changing Skill Content of Private-Sector Union Coverage (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31576

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31576

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().