CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Firms and Layoffs: The Impact of Unionization on Involuntary Job Loss

March 2003

Written by: Vanessa V Tinsley

Working Paper Number:

CES-03-09

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of unionization on involuntary job loss using establishment data from the 1997 National Employer Survey (NES-II) and merging those data with contextual data at the industry level as well as with local labor market data. The estimated logit models included information on unionization rates and employment security provisions present in collective bargaining agreements as factors influencing layoff rates for individual establishments, controlling for establishment size, firm structure, use of non-regular employees, product/service demand and local employment. Results show that the impact of unionization is not significant except for (1) establishments that operate in the non-manufacturing sector; and (2) establishments operating in industries that have major collective bargaining agreements which contain moderate employment security provisions. Under those conditions, unionization decreases layoff rates; otherwise, unionization has no effect on layoff rates. These results provide some evidence that unions may have placed increased emphasis on employment security in order to protect members against involuntary job loss. This is in contrast to earlier studies which found a positive relationship between unionization and layoffs. In addition, establishments in Right-to-Work states have higher rates of involuntary job loss.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
payroll, employee, merger, employed, labor, incentive, workplace, workforce, worker, layoff, outsourcing, outsourced, union

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Department of Commerce, Standard Statistical Establishment List, Internal Revenue Service, Standard Industrial Classification, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ordinary Least Squares, New York Times, Current Population Survey, National Research Council, Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews and Computer Assisted Personal Interviews, National Employer Survey

Similar Working Papers Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural network model know as Doc2Vec.

Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers. Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.

The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Firms and Layoffs: The Impact of Unionization on Involuntary Job Loss' are listed below in order of similarity.