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Title: Unions, Moral Economies, and Inequality: An Empirical Investigation into Cultural Pathways Linking Union Density to Income Inequality, 1970s-2010s
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2023
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Abstract: Union decline is a major contributor to rising income inequality among both unionized and non-unionized workers, which has increased by more than 40 percent since the 1980s. The moral economy perspective argues that unions foster egalitarian wage norms that are materialized in redistributive policies, wage regulations, and employers’ compensation practices. While plausible, the moral economy perspective is largely speculative. Drawing on large-scale survey data between the 1970s and 2010s, I perform a step-by-step mediation analysis of the moral economy perspective. Results show that higher union density is associated with higher support for reducing income inequality, lending support for the cultural role of unions. Results also show that wage norms explain a small portion of union density effects on voting Democratic in presidential elections and wage variance increases. Findings lend limited support for the moral economy perspective and lay an empirical foundation for evaluating unions’ normative effects on income inequality.
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Authors: Andrew Taylor Perron, Shawn
Institution: University of Toronto
Department: Sociology
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Pages: 1-160
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Poverty and Welfare
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