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.