EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The impact of unions on nonunion wage setting: Threats and bargaining

David Green, Benjamin Sand and Iain G. Snoddy

No 52, CLEF Working Paper Series from Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo

Abstract: In this paper we provide new estimates of the impact of unions on nonunion wage setting. We allow the presence of unions to affect nonunion wages both through the typically discussed channel of nonunion firms emulating union wages in order to fend off the threat of unionisation and through a bargaining channel in which nonunion workers use the presence of union jobs as part of their outside option. We specify these channels in a search and bargaining model that includes union formation and, in our most complete model, the possibility of nonunion firm responses to the threat of unionisation. Our results indicate an important role played by union wage spillovers in lowering wages over the 1980-2010 period. We find de-unionisation can account for 38% of the decline in the mean hourly wage between 1980 and 2010, with two-thirds of that effect being due to spillovers. Both the traditional threat and bargaining channels are operational, with the bargaining channel being more important.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/268258/1/1830595830.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The impact of unions on nonunion wage setting: threats and bargaining (2022) 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:zbw:clefwp:52

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CLEF Working Paper Series from Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:zbw:clefwp:52