Using data from the United States and Europe on nearly two million respondents we show the partial correlation between union membership and employee job satisfaction is positive and statistically significant. This runs counter to findings in the seminal work of Freeman (1978) and Borjas (1979)...

We explore the various claims made by Freeman and Medoff (FM) in their famous book What do unions do? about the impact of unions on wages and update them with new and better data. The main findings are as follows. 1) Private sector union wage premium is lower today than it was in the 1970s. 2)...

We revisit the well-known negative association between union coverage and individuals' job satisfaction in the United States, first identified over forty years ago. We find the association has flipped since the Great Recession such that union workers are now more satisfied than their non-union...

Workers have responded differently to declining union density in the US and UK. US workers have unfilled demand for unions whereas many UK workers free-ride at unionized workplaces. To explain this difference, we create a scalar measure of worker needs for representation and relate desire for...

This paper examines the impact of trade unions in the US and the UK and elsewhere. In both the US and the UK, despite declining membership numbers, unions are able to raise wages substantially over the equivalent non-union wage. Unions in other countries, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil,...