What Do Unions Do?

"Prior to our work, there was a shortage of evidence available on union effects. Newly available computerised data changed that. In conjunction with other social scientists, we were able to provide a more complete picture of how unions impact society. The book looked at unions from two perspectives: first, what we called the monopoly face of union – unions acting as raisers of benefits for their members – and second, the voice face of unions, or how unions represented labour in the workplace and in the body politic, giving voice to people who otherwise wouldn’t have had much say. I think, in the long run, this is the stronger and more important face of unions. The first thing unions do is to raise wages for working people, and that obviously benefits the working people. They also increase the kind of benefits that workers want. So, if workers want pensions, the unions negotiate for that. If workers want maternity leave, that’s what they bargain for. If workers want to have better insurance and are willing to give up some wages to get it, unions help them. Unions change the pattern of compensation towards greater benefits. Because unions make working life better for workers, they lower turnover in unionised workplaces. Employers with unions traditionally have workers who stay longer and contribute to raising the productivity of the enterprise. Employers also get more credible information about what workers really want in the workplace, because the union representatives are democratically elected and they really speak for the workers. So a good, functioning union is a real positive. Of course, not all unions function well. But our evidence, and the evidence people generated twenty years later, demonstrated that, on net, unions are a positive force in the economy. Public sector unions are different in an interesting way. Private sector unions can do very little to raise the demand for their services. But public sector unions can try to convince voters that we need more police and better education. By politicking, they can help public sector employers raise the funds to provide more and better public services. They have that unique attribute. When the papers were given at a set of symposia, and published in economics journals, I was very nervous – the most nervous I’ve ever been in my academic life. A fair number of the authors were conservative economists who looked at unions through an unfavorable lens, and I thought, if I had made a mistake, they were sure going to find it. So here were a bunch of people who looked at unions quite sceptically – and they actually found that almost everything we had uncovered was correct. In the end, I felt very happy that all economists could come to agreement about what unions do – at least all economists who actually looked at the evidence."