Unions in the US
Since 1979, the share of American workers belonging to unions fell from 24 percent to 11 percent. Currently, there are 7.6 million private sector workers in a union (6% of private-sector workers) and 7.9 million public sector workers in a union (34% of public-sector workers). However, since 2018 there has been an uptick in strike activity in the United States, following several decades of decline. In particular, the number of workers involved in major work stoppages increased from 25,000 in 2017 to 485,000 in 2018.
The Role of Unions
By: Aaron Sojourner, Brigham R. Frandsen
Efforts to unionize at Amazon
For the last seven weeks, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, have been voting by mail on whether to unionize. Their ballots are due on Monday, March 29th, and counting will begin the next day. If the union wins, the warehouse employees would become the first members of Amazon’s US workforce to unionize, a momentous event at a company that has long aggressively resisted labor organizing, and one that could be a first step toward improving conditions at the country’s second-largest employer.
Why the Amazon union vote is bigger than Amazon
A step further: The Finnish experience
Unlike in the US, where unions are legally the only formal worker voice institution, in many European countries workers are given the right to elect representatives to corporate boards, or establish works councils. Does workers’ voice i.e. giving feedback and even participating directly in the firm’s decision-making, reduce turnover, boosts job quality, or increase productivity? Harju et al. look at data from Finland – which in 1991 introduced a formal worker voice through board representation – to answer this question. According to the law, which applies to firms with more than 150 employees, workers have a right to elect representatives from the workforce that take 20% of the seats on the board of directors, the board of supervisors, or the management body. They use use several administrative data sources on firm and workers from Statistics Finland and a difference-in-differences design and reach two conclusions:
- Worker voice had no effects on voluntary job separations, and small positive effects on other measures of job quality (job security, health, subjective job quality, and wages);
- Worker voice slightly raised firm survival, productivity, and capital intensity.
Voice at Work
Authors: Jarkko Harju, Simon Jäger, Benjamin Schoefer
From: VATT, MIT, UC Berkeley
