The Wage Impact of Teachers Unions: A Meta‐analysis

Merkle, Jessica; Phillips, Michelle

doi:10.1111/coep.12234

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Cowen and Strunk (2015) reviewed three decades of research and found that teacher unionization and union strength are generally associated with higher teacher salaries and district spending. Merkle and Phillips (2018) performed a meta‐analysis on this evidence and similarly found that teachers’ unions generally increased wages by around 2 percent to 4.5 percent. For example, Duplantis, Chandler, and Geske (1995) found that the presence of a collective bargaining agreement increased teachers’ average wages by 9.5 percent and school district expenditures by 15.6 percent.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 98%

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

DeAngelis

Makridis

2021

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers' unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Methods. We examine the relationship between teachers' union strength and the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States using regression analyses. Results. We find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers' unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semiparametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, a further disaggregation to the county level, and various analytic techniques and datasets. We do not find evidence that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions. Conclusion. Our findings that school closures are uncorrelated with the actual incidence of the virus, but are rather strongly associated with unionization, implies that the decision to close schools has been a political-not scientific-decision.School reopening-when and how to do it-has become one of the largest and most politicized policy deliberations amid the coronavirus pandemic. At least 55 million students from over 120,000 public and private schools have been affected by closures since March 2020. 1 While only time will tell the ramifications that the absence of in-person learning will have on students' human capital development, a large body of literature suggests that higher academic achievement is associated with improved life outcomes (e.g., Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, 2014;Hanushek, 2011). However, Gross and Opalka (2020) found that only about one-third of the 477 public school districts operating remotely in their analysis required teachers to deliver remote instruction, as opposed to no instruction, in the spring of 2020. They also found that less than half of the districts expected teachers to take attendance or check in with students regularly.School closures have had an even more immediate effect on the U.S. labor market. Because roughly 32 percent of households have children under the age of 14 living with them, coupled with the collapse in the childcare market (Ali, Herbst, and Makridis, 2021), the inability to reopen schools will necessarily affect the ability for the United States to fully reopen its labor market and attain traditional levels of full-time employment since many parents will be unable to return to work.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 98%

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

DeAngelis

Makridis

2021

Social Science Quarterly

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“…Hirsch, MacPherson and Winters (2011), using the CPS for 2000–2009 and the SASS for 1999–2000, estimate a union salary advantage for teachers of 5% arising from CB laws and coverage. In their recent meta-analysis of 19 studies with 77 estimates of union wage effects, Merkle and Phillips (2018) find that teachers’ unions produced an average wage impact estimated around 2–4.5% and observe that the union effects are confounded by the measures of union status, either at the individual or district level, and legal frameworks for labor-management relations. Marianno, Bruno and Strunk (2021) find that CB restrictiveness is positively associated with expenditure on students and educators.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

What Teachers’ Unions Do for Teachers When Collective Bargaining is Prohibited

Han

Keefe

2023

Labor Studies Journal

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Our research examines the relationship between teachers’ unions, teacher compensation, employment conditions, and turnover in Southern US states that prohibit the collective bargaining of public school teachers. We assess union strength by meet-and-confer status and the teacher union density of districts and estimate union impact using propensity score matching. We find that teachers’ unions are positively associated with teacher compensation and employment conditions, even in the absence of collective bargaining. Districts with strong unions have higher dismissals of nontenured teachers for poor performance and a lower attrition rate of qualified teachers, compared to districts with weak unions. This study shows that teachers’ unions in the United States still organize without formal labor-management institutions and make a significant impact on teachers’ work lives, even in a hostile legal environment toward unions.

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“…As a result, there is no one best way to capture the entire spectrum of unionization effects as existing studies measure the variable differently. How to measure unionization is thus of considerable importance to understanding the impact of unionization (Merkle & Phillips, 2018). Among the studies on government contracting, two measures of unionization are most widely used: union membership (e.g., the percentage of public employees who are union members) and collective bargaining rights (e.g., whether public employees are covered by a collective bargaining agreement) (Anzia & Moe, 2015; Hirsch & Macpherson, 2003; Oberfield, 2021).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Sector Unionization and Government Contracting: A Meta-analysis of Four Decades of Empirical Evidence

Lu,

Chen,

Hung

2023

The American Review of Public Administration

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Within the large body of literature on government contracting, the effect of public sector unionization on contracting out is still unsettled even after decades of research. Previous literature proposes that unionization may both inhibit and motivate contracting out, making the net effect difficult to predict. Through a meta-analysis of 232 effects drawn from 49 existing studies spanning over four decades, we find that jurisdictions with higher levels of public sector unionization generally contract out more in public service delivery. Further metaregression analysis suggests that unionization has a weaker effect when governments engage in intergovernmental contracting but a stronger effect when governments contract out for technical services. Unionization also has a stronger effect on how much a government contracts out than on whether a government contracts out. Overall, unionization is a relevant, but not necessarily robust, factor in driving contracting out, and its exact effect may vary slightly by context.

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The Wage Impact of Teachers Unions: A Meta‐analysis

Cited by 10 publications

References 55 publications

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

What Teachers’ Unions Do for Teachers When Collective Bargaining is Prohibited

Public Sector Unionization and Government Contracting: A Meta-analysis of Four Decades of Empirical Evidence

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