Labor unions have been in existence for over two hundred years, initially as craft organizations, and more recently as industrial and service organizations. During their existence they have significantly enhanced the wages and fringe benefits of represented workers through the collective...

Income inequality has been lower in periods when trade unionism has been strong. Using observations on wages by occupation, by geography, and by gender in collective bargaining contracts from the 1940s to the 1970s, patterns in movements of wage differentials are revealed. As wages increased,...

Union membership in the United States displayed a ∩-shaped pattern over the 20th century, while income inequality sketched a ∪. A model of unions is developed to analyze these facts. There is a distribution of productivity across firms in the economy. Firms hire capital, plus skilled and...

Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members' views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar's burgeoning labor movement. Union leaders are positively selected on both personality traits...

The publication of John Kelly’s Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998) spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that...

Challenges from employers and governments and the limited success of public sector union responses suggest the need for renewal in Canadian public sector unions. This article engages with discussions of union renewal by way of theoretically conceptualizing the modes of union praxis relevant to...

OPTIMThe conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds the one of capitalists. We make this point in an...

Union representation has been in strong decline in most OECD countries with potentially important consequences for wages. What drives this decline? We try to answer this question by developing and implementing a detailed decomposition approach based on Fairlie (2005). Using linked...