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

John Pencavel

No 3660, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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.

Keywords: union density; trade unions; relative wage effect of unionism; union objectives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2009, 62 (2), 47-156.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3660.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:iza:izadps:dp3660

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().