Unionization, Employer Opposition, and Establishment Closure

Sean Wang and Samuel Young

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We study the effect of private-sector unionization on establishment employment and survival. Specifically, we analyze National Labor Relations Board union elections from 1981–2005 using administrative Census data. Our empirical strategy extends standard difference-in-differences techniques with regression discontinuity extrapolation methods. This allows us to avoid biases from only comparing close elections and to estimate treatment effects that include larger marginof- victory elections. Using this strategy, we show that unionization decreases an establishment’s employment and likelihood of survival, particularly in manufacturing and other blue-collar and industrial sectors. We hypothesize that two reasons for these effects are firms’ ability to avoid working with new unions and employers’ opposition to unions. We find that the negative effects are significantly larger for elections at multi-establishment firms. Additionally, after a successful union election at one establishment, employment increases at the firms’ other establishments. Both pieces of evidence are consistent with firms avoiding new unions by shifting production from unionized establishments to other establishments. Finally, we find larger declines in employment and survival following elections where managers or owners were likely more opposed to the union. This evidence supports new reasons for the negative effects of unionization we document.

JEL-codes: J23 J31 J38 J50 J53 J58 J83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 87 pages
Date: 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-35.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:23-35

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