This article examines the real wage-employment relationship in the United States in the light of the diversity of results in the literature. It demonstrates that, when the relationship is correctly specified, in the sense that due allowance is made for technical progress and capital accumulation, and the appropriate value-added deflator is used for the wage, then a negative relationship may be observed in the data. An incorrect specification, however, is as likely to lead to a positive relationship as a negative one.

The authors consider an economy in which all firms are unionized and bargain with their own union. If unions bargain over employment as well as wages, employment will be the same as if they bargain over wages only, provided that the production function is Cobb-Douglas. (Employment will be higher if the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital is smaller than unity.) If the authors start from a fully competitive labor market and then move to one of efficient bargaining (over wages and employment), employment falls. This is so even if the marginal utility of income is constant, so that bargaining is "strongly efficient."