IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/psewpa/halshs-05595205.html

Wage inequality in stakeholder organizations: Evidence from US labor unions 1959-2022

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Breda

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris)

  • Paolo Santini

    (Institute for Employment Research - University of Warwick [Coventry])

Abstract

Although unions advocate higher wages and greater equality, little is known about their own compensation practices. Using newly assembled administrative data covering more than one million observations on U.S. union workers, we show that unions practice what they preach. They pay wages that are, on average, almost 20 percent higher than those in private firms, yet are substantially more equally distributed. We show that this pattern cannot be explained by differences in skill dispersion or firm size. Instead, we trace it to institutions and norms that limit top pay, including internal member control and media-driven reputational sanctions. Our findings underscore how pay norms can shape wages in stakeholder organizations and identify the institutional channels through which such norms become effective.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Breda & Paolo Santini, 2026. "Wage inequality in stakeholder organizations: Evidence from US labor unions 1959-2022," PSE Working Papers halshs-05595205, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-05595205
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05595205v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05595205v1/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-05595205. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.