Social Attitudes, Labor Law, and Union Organizing: Toward A New Economics of Union Density

Thomas Palley

Working Papers from Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Abstract: Much has been written about union wage bargaining. Much less has been written about union density, which has been viewed as simply the employment outcome under the wage bargain. This paper presents a new dynamic model of union density that exhibits multiple equilibria and path-dependency. The model builds upon Freeman (1998) who identified the importance of union spending on organizing and business spending on opposing unions. It emphasizes the demand for union representation which depends on wage bargaining outcomes, the state of labor law, and socio-economic factors impacting public attitudes to unions. The model is used to provide a narrative account of the historical evolution of union density in the U.S. and to identify factors important for its future evolution.

Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://per.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers ... pers_51-100/WP93.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to per.umass.edu:443 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Social attitudes, labor law, and union organizing: Toward a new economics of union density (2007)
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:uma:periwp:wp93

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judy Fogg ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).