EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Union threat and non-union employment: A natural experiment on the use of temporary employment in British firms

Andrea Salvatori

Labour Economics, 2012, vol. 19, issue 6, 944-956

Abstract: This paper presents the first empirical evidence on the effect of the threat of unionisation on the use of a predominantly non-union type of employment, i.e. temporary employment. The identification strategy exploits an exogenous variation in union threat induced in the UK by new legislation enabling unions to obtain recognition even against the will of the management. The analysis finds no evidence of an effect on the probability that a firm employs fixed-term workers, and some weak evidence of a negative effect on the probability of using agency workers. Furthermore, estimates of the effect on the share of temporary employment are negative and statistically insignificant. Overall, therefore, there is no support for the hypothesis that firms under the threat of unionisation are more likely to use this type of non-union employment.

Keywords: Union threat; Temporary employment; Non-union employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537112000760
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Union Threat and Non-Union Employment: A Natural Experiment on the Use of Temporary Employment in British Firms (2011) Downloads
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:eee:labeco:v:19:y:2012:i:6:p:944-956

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2012.07.007

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:19:y:2012:i:6:p:944-956