The response of union utility to labor-saving innovation is analyzed within a framework of oligopolistic competition in the product market, taking account of wage bargaining under several alternative structures of industrial relations. Conditions are established under which wages and employment will rise or fall in response to innovation. Union opposition tends to occur when union preferences are weighted in favor of jobs and labor demand is perceived to be inelastic. Thus opposition is more likely with industry- or craft-based union organization in noncompetitive industries and is less likely with enterprise unionism in competitive industries.

This paper estimates the role of insider power in wage determination in a unionized industry, examining the direction and magnitude of biases that may arise through failure to control for variation in both hours of work and the composition of the labor force and through failure to control for the endogeneity of measured profits. Furthermore, by examining the extent to which rent-sharing is related to exogenous demand shocks rather than to potentially endogenous productivity, the authors provide a test of the bargaining and pure efficiency wage models, finding that the majority of the insider weighting can be explained by the bargaining model.