TY  - JOUR
AU  - Zax,Jeffrey S.
TI  - Municipal Employment, Municipal Unions, and Demand for Municipal Services
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 1728
PY  - 1985
Y2  - October 1985
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w1728
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w1728.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jeffrey Zax
Dept. of Economics, UCB 256
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309
E-Mail: jeffrey.zax@colorado.edu
AB  - Municipal unions may often use their own votes and those of sympathetic fellow citizens to promote increases in demand for municipal services. If successful, this strategy can increase member employment levels without sacrificing compensation. Municipal employee unionization significantly increases levels of annual manhours and employment per capita, and reduces annual hours of workper employee. The net effect of average unionization levels is to increase employees per capita by at least 4.7%, and manhours per capita by at least 3.3%, over levels that would prevail in the absence of municipal unions. These effects occur almost entirely in functions withr ecognized bargaining units. In these functions, employment levels are at least 9.9% higher than they would be in the absence of unionization.
ER  -