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...

This paper estimates that, in 1984, 43 percent of British private sector establishments had some form of profit- related pay. Regression results do not show that these establishments had statistically-significant better financial performance. Cross-ta bulations do not suggest that the...

The paper uses newly available cross-section data to study wage determination in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The main results are as follows: (1) fear of unemployment substantially depresses pay; (2) there is some evidence of a wage ratchet whereby rates of pay are more flexible upwards...