Volume 18, Number 4 (Fall) 1983
Podgursky, Michael. 1983. "Unions and Family Income Inequality." Journal of Human Resources 18(4):574-591.
The effect of union wage gains of private-sector blue-collar workers on the size distribution of family incomes and the level of poverty in 1970 is examined in this paper. Collective bargaining wage gains are found to compress the distribution of income among union families. When union and nonunion families are combined, however, the union impact on measured inequality is negligible, due in part to the fact that, on average, middle-income families reap the largest gains from collective bargaining. The impact of union wage gains on the incidence of poverty also is very small.
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
* Support for this research was provided by the National Institute for Mental
Health and the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of
Wisconsin-Madison. The author wishes to acknowledge the research assistance of
Larry Mishel, and Dale Ballou, the computer expertise of Joel Bolonik and Nancy
Williamson, and the helpful suggestions of Jeffrey Williamson, Glen Cain, Eileen
Appelbaum, George Treyz, and several anonymous referees.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X