The determinants and effects of right-to-work laws: A review of the recent literature

Moore, William J.

doi:10.1007/s12122-998-1041-z

Cited by 120 publications

(116 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…16 Freeman (1993) and Card (1992) estimated union wage premium in the 10-17% range in the 1970s and 1980s while studies such as Moore (1998) …”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do Right to Work Laws Worsen Income Inequality? Evidence from the Last Five Decades

et al. 2015

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“…16 Freeman (1993) and Card (1992) estimated union wage premium in the 10-17% range in the 1970s and 1980s while studies such as Moore (1998) …”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regarding the impact of RTW laws on wages, a summary of the empirical literature by Moore (1998) concludes that "RTW laws have no impact on union wages, nonunion wages, or average wages in either the public or private sector. 4 However, subsequent studies have challenged this conclusion.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Right to Work Laws Worsen Income Inequality? Evidence from the Last Five Decades

et al. 2015

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“…Right to work laws reduce union security by prohibiting forced union dues -thereby allowing workers covered by union contracts to enjoy union-negotiated benefits but to "free-ride" when it comes to the paying of dues. Most estimates have concluded that long-term union density is reduced by between 5 to 8 percent after the passage of a state right to work bill (See Moore, 1998). Section 14b unleashed a huge free-rider problem and undermined the incentive to join unions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Social attitudes, labor law, and union organizing: Toward a new economics of union density

Palley¹,

LaJeunesse²

2007

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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Much has been written about union wage bargaining. Much less has been written about union density, which has been viewed as simply the employment outcome under the wage bargain. This paper presents a new dynamic model of union density that exhibits multiple equilibria and path-dependency. The model builds upon Freeman (1998) who identified the importance of union spending on organizing and business spending on opposing unions. It emphasizes the demand for union representation which depends on wage bargaining outcomes, the state of labor law, and socio-economic factors impacting public attitudes to unions. The model is used to provide a narrative account of the historical evolution of union density in the U.S. and to identify factors important for its future evolution. I IntroductionMuch has been written about the theory of union wage bargaining, but relatively less research has been devoted to the density of union membership. Union density has tended to be viewed as simply the product of the employment outcome under the wage bargain. Whereas such an approach makes sense in times when the underlying state of union density is given, it makes much less sense when it comes to explaining the massive fluctuations that have occurred in the historical evolution of union density within the U.S. economy over the last hundred years.Our approach seeks to remedy this weakness in the literature on the economics of unions. It presents a dynamic model of union density that exhibits the possibility of multiple equilibria.The model builds upon Freeman (1998) who identified the importance of union spending on organizing and business spending on union busting. However, it extends the analysis to include wage bargaining effects, as well as socio-economic factors such as the state of labor law and public attitudes about unions. The model is used to provide a narrative account of the historical evolution of union density in the U.S. economy. The paper closes by identifying a new microeconomic research agenda that grows out of an explicit focus on union density. II Shifting the focus: from union bargaining to union densityEconomists have long had an interest in the economic effects of unions. However, a distinct feature of this interest has been a tendency to focus on firm-level impacts. This is typified by the monopoly union model in which the union is taken as an institutional given, and the union acts as a monopoly supplier of labor to the firm. Given this, wages and employment are determined by the union's preferences over wages and employment given the firm's labor demand curve.There are many variants of this firm level approach to unions. Nash bargaining models (McDonald and Solow, 1981) have the firm and union jointly solving a program that maximizes the product of their respective objective functions subject to each realizing a minimum acceptable outcome. This co-operative bargaining model results in a Pareto efficient outcome (which is sensible from a classical maximization perspective), but enforcement of the bargain...

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“…The Taft Some research has found little or no relationship between right-to-work laws and unionization levels (Wessels, 1981), while others have found a negative relationship (Ellwood & Fine, 1987;Moore, 1998). Even when a relationship is observed between union density and the presence of right-to-work laws, it is difficult to say that the presence of right-to-work laws causes union density to decrease.…”

Section: Union Protections and Union Densitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…High union densities in a region may be due to the types of industries in the region, to the culture (Singh, 2001), and to the laws that protect and encourage unionization (Moore, 1998). When union densities in a region are high, firms are more likely to be unionized.…”

Section: Unionization and Firm Birthsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three essays on the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurship.

Crum¹

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The determinants and effects of right-to-work laws: A review of the recent literature

Cited by 120 publications

References 78 publications

Do Right to Work Laws Worsen Income Inequality? Evidence from the Last Five Decades

Do Right to Work Laws Worsen Income Inequality? Evidence from the Last Five Decades

Social attitudes, labor law, and union organizing: Toward a new economics of union density

Three essays on the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurship.

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