ABSTRACT
Using detailed data from the US National Labor Relations Board, we find labour market tightness, defined as the ratio of job vacancies to the number of unemployed, has a positive relationship with the likelihood of voting in favour of union representation. Specifically, a 1 SD increase in labour market tightness increases Vote Share in favour and the likelihood of union certification by roughly 1.5% and 3%, respectively. We also find that length of unemployment insurance benefits has a positive relationship with Vote Share in favour. Taken together, these results suggest that workers are more comfortable engaging in pro-union election behaviours when exogenous conditions, like labour market tightness and unemployment insurance benefit duration, shift in a way that more favourably insulates them from unemployment and income risk.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Specifically, charges are often related to Discrimination Against Employees, Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act.
2 Note that we also ran the models with the standard unemployment rate included as a covariate; however, it was ultimately excluded from the final baseline models due to multi-collinearity with the labour market tightness and income measures. Researchers have noted that the vacancy–unemployed ratio (our labour market tightness measure) is a better measure of workers’ alternative employment option; see, for example, Pissarides (Citation2000).
3 We use a linear probability model, instead of probit, due to computational issues.