The Trade-Off between Wages and Employment in Trade Union Objectives

This paper demonstrates that, contrary to a widely-held opinion, the determination of the goals of unions is fully amenable to empirical analysis. A characterization of the wage and employment-setting process in unionized markets is adopted and its qualitative implications examined. The first-order condition for this model is fitted to time- series data on the newspaper industry from ten cities. The Inter- national Typographical Union 's objective function reveals very restricted opportunities for substituting wages for employment in response to a change in the slope of the employer's labor demand function. Larger union locals place greater emphasis on wages versus employment than smaller union locals.