About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

142 Monthly Lab. Rev. 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/month142 and id is 1 raw text is: LaoVIU BLS BLS January 2019 Can unions significantly reduce wage inequality? Depends on whether you're in the public or private sector Maureen Soyars Hicks As income inequality has increased in many developed countries, economists have been confronted with a question: what is causing the wide gap in wages between the rich and everyone else? One common line of inquiry has been whether there is any link between the decline in union membership and the rise in income inequality. According to Unions and wage inequality: the roles of gender, skill, and public sector employment (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 25313, November 2018), there is not a simple answer to such a complex issue. Economists David Card, Thomas Lemieux, and W. Craig Riddell find that there are striking differences between the private and public sectors in the effects of unionization on male and female wage inequality-differences that have become more pronounced over time as private and public sector unionization have diverged. Using the U.S. Current Population Survey and the Canadian Labour Force Survey together with supplements to these surveys, the authors observed that in the United States, the rate of unionization has fallen in the private sector (to 7 percent in 2017), while the rate in the public sector has increased (to 39 percent in 2017). These trends were essentially the same in Canada: private sector unionization has been dropping for decades and was just 16.4 percent in 2017, while public sector unionization has risen and was 75.5 percent in 2017. The authors note that with the steady decline in private sector unionization and rising influence in the public sector, half of all unionized workers are now in the public sector. This shift has also led to profound changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Whereas union jobs were historically concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector industries, recent years have shown a noteworthy increase in the share of women among unionized workers. Currently, approximately half of union employees in the United States and Canada are women. For example, in the United States, the percentage of males in private sector labor unions fell from 31 percent in 1973 to 9 percent in 2015, while it rose in the public sector from 29 percent to 43 percent over the same period. Similarly, the percentage of women in private sector unions declined from 13 percent in 1973 to 6 percent in 2015, while the rate in the public sector rose from 18 percent to 41 percent. So what effect have these changes in unionization had on wage inequality? The authors note that, on the whole, unions reduce economy-wide wage inequality by less than 10 percent. However, union impacts on wage inequality in the public and private sectors differ quite a lot. In the private sector, distributions of union and nonunion wages are very similar. On average, private sector unions reduce male inequality by 1.5 percent in the

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most