Teachers,Unions,and Wages in the 1970s: Unionism Now Pays

Abstract

This paper provides evidence that confirms the results of previous studies that teacher unionism produced relatively small wage gains during the early 1970s, but it also shows that union gains increased substantially in the late 1970s. The evidence is based on an application of two complementary research designs—cross-section wage-level regressions and cross-section wage-change regressions—to national samples of teacher data for 1974–75 and 1977–78. The authors conclude that the union/nonunion wage differential among teachers reached 12 to 22 percent by the late 1970s, and during the period 1974–78 the real wages of unionized teachers increased while those of nonunionized teachers declined. They offer several possible explanations for these trends.