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Title: Closing Ranks: Organized Labor And Immigration

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: This paper shows that immigration positively affected the development of organized labor in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. I digitize archival data to construct the first county-level dataset on historical union membership in the U.S. and use a shift-share instrument to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in immigration between 1900 and 1920. Ifind that counties that received more immigration experienced an increase in the probability ofhaving any labor union, the share of unionized workers, the number of local union branches,and the average branch size. Exploring the mechanisms driving the effect, I find that theincrease occurred only among unions representing skilled workers, particularly in countiesmore exposed to the immigrants’ labor competition, and in places harboring less favorable attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, these results indicate that existing workersformed and joined labor unions due to both economic and social motivations. The findings shed light on a novel driver of unionization in the early 20th-century United States: in the absence of immigration, the average union density of this period would have been 17% lower.They also identify an unexplored consequence of immigration: the development of institutions that aim to protect workers’ status in the labor market.

Url: https://carlomedici.github.io/home/CarloMedici_JMP.pdf

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Authors: Medici, Carlo

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

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