[HN Gopher] The cumulative advantage of a unionized career for l...
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The cumulative advantage of a unionized career for lifetime
earnings
Author : tareqak
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-10-12 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| How about cumulative disadvantage to those who were willing to
| work for non-union wages but were banned from being hired?
| karaterobot wrote:
| It's very frustrating that there's no actual article to read,
| just an abstract. No SciHub access either. What kind of
| discussion are we expected to have here, other than questions
| about what the article would say if we could read it, or a
| referendum on whether we like labor unions or not?
| the_optimist wrote:
| The data is right censored, rendering the analysis pretty
| useless. Businesses that close (e.g. the entire US steel industry
| for a generation), are absent, and their employees sure didn't
| enjoy that bump.
| VictorPath wrote:
| Steel workers were unionized, and there are less US steel
| workers now. Textile workers in the Carolinas were not
| unionized, and there are a lot less Carolina textile workers
| now.
|
| The difference is Larry Page's grandfather was at a union job
| in Michigan in the 1930s and sent his son to college, and then
| his grandson started Google. Textile workers in the Carolinas
| got less education, and then the factories closed up.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| What are you talking about? The workers at those business don't
| disappear in a puff of smoke, they go on to work or not work
| somewhere else so if the end of the industry makes them spend
| the rest of their day unemployed that will of course impact
| their total earnings.
|
| At most they end up in the "didn't work that long in a union
| job" bucket, not sure where you get the idea that these peoples
| experience is _excluded_
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I'm curious how the distribution looks. (I'm also curious about
| this in general but I haven't tried very hard to find data on it
| and I'd guess it differs a lot depending on the type of work and
| industry norms). I don't know if it's in the study as I could
| only read the abstract.
|
| It also seems slightly difficult to reason about unions today
| from this data; I think unionised work from when the study
| started was somewhat different. But it would probably also be
| unfair of me to say that e.g. becoming a unionised coal miner
| (back when the study started) wouldn't be great for lifetime
| earnings - becoming a non-unionised coal miner might be even
| worse!
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The data goes up to 2019, and while it is of course impossible
| to say now what the gain _is_ for someone who works a unionized
| job for 40 years starting in 2010, they tried to see if there
| was some trend in the data for more recent cohorts:
|
| > Given strong declines in union membership, future cohorts may
| see smaller cumulative gains from union membership; in
| additional analyses, we find that this outcome is likely
| channeled through declines in union membership, rather than
| declines in the wage premium associated with union membership.
| Our findings suggest that the increasingly rare group of
| workers who are persistently unionized may nonetheless see
| similar gains as observed in this study.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's a difficulty with research like this (in the US at least,
| although the US also offers us interesting contrasts) in a) that
| something like 6.5% of workers are in unions, so they constitute
| an extreme minority, and b) that the unions that lasted the
| longest were probably the strongest, so the longer your union
| career was, the better your union probably was.
|
| There's also a problem with applying it to the future, because
| union jobs are largely in manufacturing (and government), and
| manufacturing once paid a premium that it doesn't anymore. Since
| 2006, the average non-management manufacturing job pays less than
| the average non-management job.
|
| https://www.turboimagehost.com/p/80306414/fredgraph.png.html
|
| All that being said, I am downloading and having a look.
| istjohn wrote:
| Don't forget about construction.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| If unions decreased lifetime earnings, do you think companies
| would fight them so vehemently?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| If they decreased lifetime earnings but increased the cost to
| the company of each employee, the company still has an
| incentive to fight them.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Possibly. Do you think salary is the main motivation for
| companies? Do you think FAANG companies couldn't find 50k
| engineers in the US that would accept 50% pay? Of course they
| could, but they feel that they're getting more value by
| paying more.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Unions might decrease lifetime earnings, while _also_ killing
| off the industry entirely...
|
| For example, classically union heavy industries like coal
| mining... And weaving...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Who said unions decreased lifetime earnings?
|
| edit: If you're trying to say that this study and the amount
| that union membership earns a worker is obviously correct
| without using any reference to the study, I disagree with
| that method of processing new information.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Can someone who has access say if they count healthcare and
| disability? Because WHOO that's a huge difference within the
| sectors where you see bifurcation
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| This is purely measuring how much extra wage you get as a
| unionised worker, value from any other benefits is not
| included.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I can't see behind the paywall, but how much of that is the
| pension? If one calculates how much money in retirement savings
| you need to replace a good pension, one will come up with a
| number very close to that of the $1.3M headline figure.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Lifetime here means "until age of 65" (or whichever age after
| 58 is the last in the dataset for an individual), and the
| measure is _earnings_ so before people get to spend it. Thus it
| 's hard to see how any of it could be the pension.
| ghaff wrote:
| That was my reading as well. And, of course, there are also
| quite a few non-union legacy defined benefit pensions as they
| were pretty standard at big companies for a long time.
|
| As someone else commented, a lot of big unions aligned with
| well-paying blue collar jobs (as well as at least solidly
| paying public sector etc. work). I'm not sure that you can
| conclude those jobs were better paying because of unions or
| because you had relatively empowered organized groups of
| workers who formed unions.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Depends on if it's total compensation or not. The money in
| your pension is "paid" to you when you're old, but it's
| ideally being released to you from a annuity that is already
| paid up. Business-friendly laws usually enable companies to
| keep these funds insolvent, and instead to maintain their
| retirees as creditors indefinitely, but that's not the model.
| tareqak wrote:
| I found this article from the following tweet:
|
| NEW STUDY: Being in a union means a $1.3 million increase in
| lifetime earnings - larger than the average gains from getting a
| college degree.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/158020922939...
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