Wage and Employment Determinants under Trade Unionism: The InternationalTypographical Union

This paper represents the first empirical application of a model of trade union behavior that has been discussed in the literature for over thirty years. The wages and employment o typographers are examined to see whether they can be usefully characterized as the outcome of a process by which the union maximizes an objective function containing wages and employment and is constrained by a trade-off between these two variables as represented by the employer's labor demand function. Our functional form assumptions permit investigation of some familiar special cases of union behavior. We find the parameter implications of both the wage bill maximization hypothesis and the rent maximization hypothesis to provide inferior explanations of the movement of wages and employment of these workers compared with our more general formulation.