Declining Unionization in Construction: The Facts and the Reasons

Abstract

This paper examines the forces behind the decline in the union share of construction employment from almost one-half in 1966 to less than one-third in 1983. The percentage of construction workers employed by union contractors has declined even further because the fraction of union members working in the open shop sector rose from 29 to 46 percent between 1973 and 1981. The growth of the union-nonunion wage gap between 1967 and 1973 contributed to the initial decline in the percentage unionized, but that gap did not widen after 1973 and actually has narrowed substantially since 1978. Probably more influential has been the erosion of the productivity advantage of union contractors, which dropped substantially between 1972 and 1977 and vanished by 1982.