When faculty at Canadian universities unionized, it improved salaries for the lowest paid members. The observation comes from a recent study conducted by a team of labour economists including, Professors Michael Baker and Kory Kroft of the Department of Economics. The authors found salaries at the bottom end of the pay scale increased by about 12% in the years following unionization.
“Our focus is on the first 5-6 years after a university faculty unionized,” said Professor Baker. “What we observe is that salary floors in the first contracts brought immediate benefits to the lower paid faculty members.”
The results are compelling as past research, while extensive, has been largely unable to quantify just how unions affect wages and for which subsets of the membership.
“There are not a lot of studies that have credible estimates of the wage impacts of unionization,” said Professor Kroft, Professor of Economics. “That’s surprising because labour economists have been studying unionization for decades. But for reasons that have to do with methodology and the quality of data, we don’t really had a good sense of their impact on wages.”
Access to novel and highly specific data sets, coupled with new methodologies are behind the authors’ ability to specify the role of unionization in wage distribution changes.
“We had a great data set on the population of faculty at Canadian universities over a 50-year span which was the basis of a study of the impact of pay transparency laws,” said Baker. “We realized that we could use to data to also examine how worker compensation changes in the first years of unionization. Most previous research examines workplaces where unions have been in place for longer periods of time.” [Read more…]
