How Successful Have Trade Unions Been?: A Utility-Based Indicator of Union Well-Being

John Pencavel

No 08-002, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Can conventional economic analysis help in defining and measuring the success of labor unions? In this paper, a general indicator of union welfare is proposed and particular expressions for the wage and employment objectives of unions are rearranged to derive measures of union success or welfare. These indicators combine two measures: union density and the relative union-nonunion wage gap. The indicators are applied to describe the movement of union welfare in the United States over the past eighty years, the differences in union success among groups of U.S. workers, and the variation in union well-being across countries. The results suggest that U.S. unions’ success peaked in the 1950s and 1960s; they have tended to benefit Black workers especially Black men, more than other groups; and, in recent decades, a very low unionization rate has contributed to make them less successful, overall, than unions in other countries with similar labor markets.

Keywords: Labor Unions; Wage Gap; Union Density (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/08-002.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Successful Have Trade Unions Been? A Utility-Based Indicator of Union Well-Being (2009)
Working Paper: How Successful Have Trade Unions Been? A Utility-Based Indicator of Union Well-Being (2008)
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:sip:dpaper:08-002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).