Blacklist or Short List: Do Employers Discriminate against Union Supporter Job Applicants?

Nicole Kreisberg and Nathan Wilmers

ILR Review, 2022, vol. 75, issue 4, 943-973

Abstract: Starting in the 1980s, US employers revived aggressive action against unions. Employers’ public opposition to unions yielded a scholarly consensus that US employers actively and consistently discriminate against union supporters. However, evidence for widespread employer anti-union discrimination is based mainly on employer reactions to rare union organizing campaigns. To measure baseline or preventive anti-union discrimination, the authors field the first ever US-based résumé correspondence study of employer responses to union supporter applicants. Focus is on entry-level, non-college degree jobs and findings show no difference in employer callback rates for union supporter applicants relative to non-union applicants. Drawing on interviews and survey data, the authors suggest that union weakness itself may have hollowed preventive employer discrimination against union supporters.

Keywords: labor unions; correspondence audit; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00197939211036444 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sae:ilrrev:v:75:y:2022:i:4:p:943-973

DOI: 10.1177/00197939211036444

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().