H. Gregg Lewis' estimates of the relative wage effect of unionism between 1920 and 1958 are routinely cited though they have rarely been subject to scrutiny. This paper extends Lewis' data to 1980 and, in particular, we construct a series on union membership that links up with the data available in the 1970's from the Current Population Surveys. We proceed to reexamine the effects of trade unions both on relative wages and on relative manhours worked.

Using data collected by the authors on the largest and most durable of worker-owned firms in U.S. manufacturing, this paper is addressed to two questions. First, are the responses of cooperatives to changes in their economic environment different from those of conventional firms? It appears that cooperatives are more inclined to adjust pay than employment. Second, how profitable has membership in the cooperatives been? Using information on share prices, we find membership to have been extremely profitable, and in this sense, the prices of co-ops' shares have been underpriced. The riskiness of cooperative membership is discussed.

Orley Ashenfelter, John H. Pencavel; American Trade Union Growth, 1900–1960: A Rejoinder, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 86, Issue 4, 1 Novembe

I. Some determinants of union growth, 435. — II. Empirical results, 439. — III. Consideration of some subperiods, 445. — IV Conclusion, 447.

Though it is routinely posited that organizations with different property rights will not exhibit the same responses to changes in their economic environment, compelling evidence of such behavior is difficult to find. We collected observations on two types of firms--conventional proprietorships and worker-owned cooperatives--operating in the same industry, in the same location, and at the same period of time. We compare the firms' reactions to changes in their input and output prices and ask whether their reactions are consistent with orthodox models of profit and dividend maximization.

This article is concerned with hours worked per employee in unionized labor markets. First the determination of hours is examined in the context of various bargaining models and, in the process, these models are nested in a general framework. Then cross-section and time-series data are drawn on to quantify the effects of unionism on hours worked. The time-series data from 1920 to 1980 imply a negative impact of unionism on full-time hours while cross-section data for 1978 suggest some notable differences in both the direction and the magnitude of this impact across occupations and industries.

Two models of wage and employment determination in unionized markets are routinely exposited. According to one, wage and employment outcomes are on the firm's labor demand curve; according to the other, wages and employment are on the partie' contract curve. This paper spells out an empirical procedure that discriminates between these two models and applies this procedure to the particular case of the newspaper industry and the International Typographical Union. The labor demand curve model is inconsistent with our data, while the contract curve model comes closer to describing our observations.

The wages and employment of typographers are examined to see whether they can be usefully characterized as the outcome of a process by which the union maximizes an objective function containing wages and employment and is constrained by a trade-off between these two variables as represented by the employer's labor demand function. Our functional form assumptions permit investigation of some familiar special cases of union behavior. The parameter implications of both the wage bill maximization hypothesis and the rent maximization hypothesis provide inferior explanations of the movement of wages and employment of these workers compared with our more general formulation.

The wages and employment of typographers are examined to see whether they can be usefully characterized as the outcome of a process by which the union maximizes an objective function containing wages and employment and is constrained by a trade-off between these two variables as represented by the employer's labor demand function. Our functional form assumptions permit investigation of some familiar special cases of union behavior. The parameter implications of both the wage bill maximization hypothesis and the rent maximization hypothesis provide inferior explanations of the movement of wages and employment of these workers compared with our more general formulation.