Recent studies of wage bargaining and unemployment have emphasized the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and that unions act in the interest of insiders. Yet it is typically assumed that insiders and recently hired outsiders are paid the same wage. We consider a model where the...

The basic idea is that employed and unemployed workers have diverging interest s and that wage decisions tend to favor the interest of those employe d. This is shown to imply that unemployment, once created, tends to p ersist after wage contracts have been negotiated anew. The reason is that the...