Neil Millward

Unionism and Employment Behaviour

Although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages, there is no published work that uses microeconomic data on establishments to examine the employment consequences of unionism. This paper addresses this issue with a recent British data set and shows that, even after the addition of a substantial set of control variables, there is a strong association between poor employment performance and the presence of trade unions. The union employment growth differential is estimated at approximately -3 percent per annum. Copyright 1991 by Royal Economic Society.

Union effects on pay levels in Britain

Abstract The contraction of union representation in Britain raises the question of whether or not unions still achieve a wage premium. Analysis of matched employer–employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey shows that there is now no demonstrable premium for private sector workers in general. However, unions do achieve a wage premium of around 9% for about half of employees covered by collective bargaining arrangements. The effect of union bargaining spills over to other employees in the same workplaces. The paper identifies circumstances where union effects are strongest—employer endorsement of union membership, high collective bargaining coverage and multi-unionism.

Trade unions and employment change: An analysis of British establishment data☆

Few explanations of the changing employment structures of industrialised countries have omitted some reference to the role of trade unions. For some commentators, it is the unions’ ability to raise wages above their ‘natural market level’ that constitutes a brake on employment growth by increasing the employer’s costs and making product prices-uncompetitive. For others, it is the unions’ power to impose uneconomic working practices upon management that leads to decline or lack of growth of the organisation [for a discussion see Freeman and Medoff (1984), Mayhew (1983)]. Empirical testing of these and other lines of explanation has been hampered in Britain by lack of suitable datasets. While employment data are detailed and widely available, systematic and reliable information on the extent of trade union influence has been restricted to reported membership levels for broad industry groups [see, for example, Bain and Price (1983), Pencavel (1974)], the ‘coverage’ of collective bargaining derived from earnings surveys [see, for example, Mulvey (1976), Layard, Metcalf and Nickel1 (1978)] and the extent and frequency of strike action [see, for example, Smith et al. (1978)J. The availability of a new series of nationally representative surveys at the establishment level has enabled us to obtain new insights into the relationship between changes in employment and trade union organisation at the point where such relationships arguably occur the place of work.’ The

The Impact of Unions on Pay Levels in Lower-Skilled Jobs

The decline in trade union influence over the past two decades raises the question of whether pay levels in lower-skilled jobs now lie outside the unions’ sphere of influence, as tacitly acknowledged by their acceptance and later endorsement of the principle of the statutory minimum wage. This article examines pay levels among lower-skilled jobs in the private sector in Britain using the Workplace Employee Relations Survey of 1998. It shows that trade unions still had a positive impact upon pay levels in lower-skilled jobs and identifies those forms of unionism associated with the largest premiums. However, the article also shows that the activities of trade unions did little to counteract the forces generating the lowest levels of pay.

Research Note: The Representativeness of WERS 98 - A Clarification

No abstract available.