Research

In this paper, we look at the long-term evolution of the composition of union membership in the four largest European countries: France, West Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Using unexploited micro-data coming from post-electoral, labor, and household surveys, we first revisit commonly accepted unionization levels from the past 60 years. We nd that, for France and Italy, union density was at times under- and over- estimated respectively. Second, we present long-run evidence on the evolution of the composition of unions in terms of the socio-economic characteristics (occupation, length of education, public or private sector, gender) of their members. Two types of unionisation emerge from this analysis. In France and Italy, the composition of unions has been primarily determined by structural changes in the composition of the workforce with no notable changes in the selection of the different groups into unions when aggregate density varied. In the UK and West Germany, instead, selection into unions has changed dramatically: Blue collars and less educated workers were over-represented in the '60s, but this has declined over time. We argue that these two types of unionization are related to the institutional characteristics of each country and show that the evolution of selection into union is linked to the public-sectorization of unions: as union density fall, the share of public workers in unions increases.

While labor unions bargain for more equality among their members and in the general society, little is known about their own compensation practices. Using administrative earnings data covering almost all employees and officers of U.S. labor unions over the period 2000-2016, we show that unions do “as they preach”. They pay wages that are on average 30% higher than in comparable U.S. private firms, but much more equally distributed: Gini coefficients are 20% smaller among unions and the share of total earnings accruing to the top 1% of wage earners is twice smaller. We argue that such a low level of inequality, especially at the top, is puzzling because union leaders do have some margin to set their own pay due to the absence of a strong internal control mechanism on the pay-setting in such non-profit organizations. We show that media can however act as an external source of control by advertising cases where earnings are deemed too high. For example, 20% of union leaders with earnings above $500K have been attacked by the press, and these attacks have been followed by a 20% average drop in their earnings. Two important features explain the effectiveness of the media in limiting earnings among union employees. First, those earnings are publicly available. Second, the idea that union employees should not be highly paid is widely spread among the general public. This social norm incentivizes the media to release articles about high-wage union employees, and it makes such releases a real threat for unions’ consumer base retention. This mechanism can help understanding why inequality is so low, particularly at the top, in labor organizations. More generally, it shows how pay norms can affect real pay, even in a declining sector where firms have strong incentives to perform well in order to survive.

Labor unions have traditionally been the advocates of workers' equality, but women have been under-represented among their ranks for a long time.  Using a novel rich dataset on the composition of American unions' workers between 1959 and 2016, we analyze the evolution of gender inequalities within labor unions and compare it with the evolution of inequalities in the general society using the CPS. We find that, although the share of women among union workers rose quickly in the 1970s as women labor force participation increased, the share of women among union executives increased much less and is still below 25% today. As women's enrollment in unions' key positions has increased, the gender wage gap has decreased and is now very close to zero, even at the very top. We explain our results by two factors: i) the increasing feminization of union membership, and ii) the change in the prevailing social norms. Those results indicate that, although unions' main role has always been to fight for workers' rights and more equality, they have not themselves always been exempt from the inequalities that affect the labor market and they further need to work within their organizations to pave the way to equality.