Union Worker Wage Effect in the Public Sector

Bahrami, Bahman; Bitzan, John; Leitch, Jay A.

doi:10.1007/s12122-008-9048-z

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…This work does not tie individuals or unions to specific units of government, and so does not explore the governmental issues we aim to address here. That said, the wage premium literature does show (among other things) that comparable public employees-those with the same employment-relevant characteristics-do tend to have higher earnings when they are members of unions (e.g., Gregory and Borland, 1999;Blanchflower and Bryson, 2004;Bahrami, Bitzan, and Leitch, 2009;Bitzan and Bahrami, 2010).…”

Section: Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government

Anzia

Moe

2015

The Journal of Politics

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As recent political battles in Wisconsin, Ohio, and a number of other states attest, public sector unions are among the most active interest groups in American politics. They are also different from other interest groups in two key respects: they engage in collective bargaining, and are thus in a position to shape the organization of government in ways that other groups are not, and their members are the government's own employees-its bureaucrats-who not only influence government from the inside through their official roles, but also from the outside through their unions. For all of these reasons, public sector unions are eminently worthy of scholarly attention, and yet political scientists have almost never studied them. This paper is an attempt to make some headway. Our focus is on how unions and collective bargaining in the public sector affect the costs of government. We present three separate studies, using different datasets from different historical periods, and we examine a range of cost-related outcomes: wages and salaries, health benefits, employment levels, and pension liabilities. In all three studies, our findings show that strong unions and collective bargaining do tend to increase the costs of government, and the impacts are both substantively and statistically significant. In presenting these findings, we hope to encourage other scholars to view public sector unions as important subjects of analysis.

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Section: Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government

Anzia

Moe

2015

The Journal of Politics

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“…unions typically raise wages; however, measured union wage effects are somewhat lower in the public sector (where our universities are all located) than in the private sector (Blanchflower and Bryson 2004). Some of the difference appears to be explained by public-sector workers being more educated and more often white collar than average (Bahrami, Bitzan, and Leitch 2009).…”

Section: Impact On Pay/benefitsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Effects of Unionization on Graduate Student Employees: Faculty-Student Relations, Academic Freedom, and Pay

2013

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In cases involving unionization of graduate student research and teaching assistants at private U.S. universities, the National Labor Relations Board has, at times, denied collective bargaining rights on the presumption that unionization would harm faculty-student relations and academic freedom. Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty-student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty-student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees. I n its 2004 Brown University decision, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rejected extending collective bargaining rights to graduate student assistants at private universities. The NLRB argued that graduate student assistants were primarily students and thus not statutory employees, the student-university relationship was not analogous to the traditional employee-employer relationship, and extending collective bargaining rights to graduate student assistants would threaten the quality of student-teacher relationships and "infringe upon traditional academic freedoms" (Brown University

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“…31 On the other hand, we noted earlier that some believe that unionization influences the ability of labor to secure wage increases, 32 a claim that applies to both public and private unions. 33 While the private sector unionization rate had collapsed to only 7.2% by 2003, the public sector rate had grown to 37.2% by the same year. 34 Much of this growth, however, occurred during the 1970s, with public sector unionization rates remaining fairly stable thereafter.…”

Section: Justifying Replicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cost growth of government revisited

Semat

Lowery²,

Linn³

et al. 2015

Bus. polit.

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What accounts for the growing cost of government in the US? [Berry, William D., and David Lowery. 1984. “The Growing Cost of Government: A Test of Two Explanations.”Social Science Quarterly65 (3): 735–749] tested two explanations for why the costs of goods and services in the public sector have increased faster than these costs in the private sector in the US: “Baumol's Disease” [Baumol, William J. 1967. “Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis.”The American Economic Review57 (3): 415–426], which focuses on the need for government to match wage increases in the more productive private sector, and [Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1977. “The Expanding Public Sector: Wagner Squared.”Public Choice31 (1): 147–150] Bureau Voting explanation, which focuses on the voting power of government employees. Berry and Lowery (1984) tested these two explanations using data for the 1947–1979 period and found strong support for the former but little support for the latter. Decades later, a much longer time-series is now available for empirical analysis. Additionally, the character of both public- and private-sector production and the voting power of public employees have changed in ways that may influence the empirical veracity of the two explanations. For these reasons, we extend the original analysis through 2010 to assess whether Baumol's Disease and Bureau Voting continue to have relevance for understanding government cost growth. We find that Baumol's Disease continues to be the better explanation despite changes in both sectors, although public sector wages are now more closely tied to general private rather than manufacturing wages, suggesting that growing production costs may be serving as an increasingly relevant downward pressure on the scope of real government activity.

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Union Worker Wage Effect in the Public Sector

Abstract: Public sector, Union wage premiums,

Cited by 14 publications

References 16 publications

Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government

Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government

Effects of Unionization on Graduate Student Employees: Faculty-Student Relations, Academic Freedom, and Pay

The cost growth of government revisited

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