Management Opposition, Strikes and Union Threat

Author – Patrick Nüß.

Abstract :

I estimate management opposition to unions in terms of hiring discrimination with a large-scale field experiment in the German labor market. By sending 13000 fictitious job applications, revealing union membership in the CV and a pro-union sentiment via social media accounts, I provide evidence for hiring discrimination. Callback rates for union members decrease significantly in the presence of a high sectoral share of union members and large firm size. I further explore variations in regional and sectoral strike intensity and find weak evidence that discrimination increases if a sector is exposed to an intense strike. Yet, strike activities are of minor importance for the overall extent of hiring discrimination. My results indicate that hiring discrimination can be explained by union threat effects. Sectors with lower hiring discrimination have a lower coverage of collective agreements and in the absence of a collective agreement they are less likely to follow collective agreement wage setting.