This paper reports estimates of union membership gathered from May Current Population Surveys, from 1973 to 1981. The authors present data by occupation, industry, selected states and SMSAs, race, gender, and educational attainment. The paper both extends and differs from that by Freeman and Medoff, which presents unionism estimates for the private sector for 1968-75. To facilitate longitudinal analysis, this paper reports three-year moving averages of occupational and industry data and annual estimates of demographic classifications. The data include public sector as well as private sector workers, and they exclude workers not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Also, the authors provide only union-membership estimates, not estimates on workers covered by union contracts. This paper suggests that the percentage of all workers that are unionized in the United States remained fairly constant over the 1973-81 period.
FOR several years, the May Current Population Surveys (CPS) provided industrial relations researchers and practitionerswith a valuable source of unionmembership data, potentially useful to anyone studying the impact of unionization on the employment relationship or preferences for and trends in unionization.
This paper argues that the mandatory-permissive distinction in the scope of the duty to bargain collectively should be abandoned in favor of a policy of classifying all lawful subjects as mandatory. The author shows that in recent applications of the distinction by the NLRB and the courts, many subjects of interest to labor have been declared within the exclusive control of management. She argues that the rationales used by the Board and the courts in these decisions are not compelling, and the mandatory-permissive distinction is even less convincing when its current application is compared to the criteria of an ideal scope of bargaining.
TN NLRB v. Wooster Div. of Borg-WarnerCorporation,' decided more than 25 years ago, the Supreme Court endorsed the NLRB's policy of distinguishing lawful subjects of collective bargaining as either mandatory or permissive. That case generated much controversy, and the distinction continues to be the subject of justifiable criticism and concern for several reasons. First, legal scholars generally agree that decisions identifying what is within or outside the scope of compulsory bargaining affect both the bargaining process and bargaining outcomes (Cox 1958;Klare 1982;St. Antoine
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