Abstract

U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past 100 years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality. We document dramatic changes in the demographics of union members: when density was at its mid-century peak, union households were much less educated and more nonwhite than other households, whereas pre-World War II and today they are more similar to nonunion households on these dimensions. However, despite large changes in composition and density since 1936, the household union premium holds relatively steady between 10 and 20 log points. We use our data to examine the effect of unions on income inequality. Using distributional decompositions, time series regressions, state-year regressions, as well as a new instrumental-variable strategy based on the 1935 legalization of unions and the World War II–era War Labor Board, we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s.

中文翻译：

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二十世纪的工会与不平等：来自调查数据的新证据*

摘要

在过去的 100 年里，美国的收入不平等与工会密度成反比。但事实证明，超越这种总体关系很困难，部分原因是 1973 年之前工会会员资格的微观数据有限。我们开发了一个新的工会会员资格微观数据来源，可追溯到 1936 年，调查数据主要来自盖洛普 ( N≈ 980,000)，以检验工会与不平等之间的长期关系。我们记录了工会成员人口统计数据的巨大变化：当人口密度达到本世纪中叶的高峰时，工会家庭的受教育程度远低于其他家庭，而且非白人家庭的比例更高，而二战前和今天的非工会家庭与其他家庭的情况更相似。这些维度。然而，尽管自 1936 年以来组成和密度发生了很大变化，但家庭工会保险费保持相对稳定在 10 到 20 个对数点之间。我们使用我们的数据来检验工会对收入不平等的影响。使用分布分解、时间序列回归、州年回归以及基于 1935 年工会合法化和二战时期战争劳工委员会的新工具变量策略，