According to David Schneider and Adam Reich it does, their paper is called Marrying Ain’t Hard When You Got A Union Card? Labor Union Membership and First Marriage. The abstract is this:
Over the past five decades, marriage has changed dramatically, as young people began marrying later or never getting married at all. Scholars have shown how this decline is less a result of changing cultural definitions of marriage, and more a result of men’s changing access to social and economic prerequisites for marriage. Specifically, men’s current economic standing and men’s future economic security have been shown to affect their marriageability. Traditionally, labor unions provided economic standing and security to male workers. Yet during the same period that marriage has declined among young people, membership in labor unions has declined precipitously, particularly for men. In this article, we examine the relationship between union membership and first marriage and discuss the possible mechanisms by which union membership might lead to first marriage. We draw on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-79 to estimate discrete time event-history models of first marriage entry and find that, controlling for many factors, union membership is positively and significantly associated with marriage. We show then that this relationship is largely explained by the increased income, regularity and stability of employment, and fringe benefits that come with union membership.
That is via the excellent Kevin Lewis, who cites some other interesting papers at the link.
In other words, while Lyndon Johnson helped fuel black social dysfunction, Ronald Reagan contributed to white America’s “Coming Apart”.
An excellent and under-remarked point.
If not for Reagan, the model of massively overpaying people for unskilled labor would have been sustainable?
How sustainable is the model of paying people for no labor?
Can’t I be against both?
Your placing them in opposition to each other and implying you must do one or the other is weird. And it certainly doesn’t work that way in practice. The same political impulses that lead to protectionist labor policies also lead to generous welfare policies.
Sure, in that world where we just light out for the frontier and set up our classical liberal order restricted solely to individuals with IQs of 100 and above.
Most union labor involve(d) skilled work. The idea that only college degrees lead to skill is a remarkably snobbish notion. No one commenting on this blog, including myself, including our host, could walk onto a factory floor and do the job after a quickie lesson.
Right. Apparently, Reagan dictated policy in the entire developed world.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/01/art3full.pdf
I can think of plenty of arguments against the point as well. I haven’t seen much to recommend the union movement. Recall Britain’s legendary Jaguar Cars, Ltd. with its fat, happy, unionized workforce, making cars that burned down houses.
I’m thinking we pay for this one way or the other. Either we enact tariffs and pay people to work, or we have free trade and pay them not to work. I think the welfare model is way more dysfunctional.
Aren’t you a lawyer and thus enjoy guild protections?
And lawyers have arguably caused far more destruction than Jags ever have.
Hopefully it’s clear I’m arguing for guild protections for Americans.
“I’m on the lifeboat, it can leave now.”
I share your concern. I think wage subsidies are the ticket.
“I’m thinking we pay for this one way or the other.”
Yup. Indeed, that’s pretty much of a general rule: one way or another, somebody has to pay.
@The Anti-Gnostic, that is an interesting point. However, are there any countries that pay people to work instead of paying people not to work? Most countries with more employment protections and unionization also have larger welfare systems than the U.S.
True. They are also demographically cratering and in debt and hoping African and Middle Eastern immigration will take up the slack. My point would be ultimately you can afford to have one or the other (generous employment terms or generous welfare, that is).
They also have high youth unemployment problems.
Except that those welfare systems (excluding old age and disability systems) are integrated with labor, and moving people who are unemployed back into jobs.
If you look at a graph of private sector union membership rates in the US you will see a 30 year decline until the middle of Reagan’s presidency, when the rate of decline slows.
If you believe in what you claim to believe, namely that presidents cause de-unionization, you should credit Reagan for ‘helping’ unions.
Huh?
Seems pretty straightforward to me. Union membership is highly correlated with union employment which is, as mentioned, higher paying and stable to the point of folly. Many families are not forming at the low end because of the lack of these.
I’d say it’s less that unions have an advantage, and more that the unions that are left are at the higher end of blue collar employment.
I also don’t see a control for union members being in the workforce (and hence marrying) earlier than the other large group of stably employed men, college graduates.
I think the authors have point here but I don’t believe union membership that is the contributing variable. The first marriage in Germany is over 30 so the union impact is not the impact variable here.
In reality, I hold that optimal marriage success depends more on if the couple is settled in a career. If neither member of the marriage are settled, then the couple more likely to end in divorce as opposed if the both members of the marriage are settled then chances of divorces decreases. (Witness the whole 16 and Pregrant MTV shows to see the young marriage will fail.) From a historical sense, 1960 union membership gave the man a settled career in his early 20s so marriage happened earlier in these lives.
Right, what was unusual about the Baby Boom era in the U.S. was that you could get a highly desirable union job at a young age, say, after high school and 2 years in the military.
There are desirable jobs like that still around, such as fireman, but the selection process is now so competitive that men in their early 20s don’t have much of a chance.
The supply of labor was constrained during the Baby Boom era [1946-1964) by the lack of immigration, the relatively low birthrate in 1930-1945, and by the popularity of women not working. Combined with high demand, this created a golden age for the American worker and a high birth rate.
Women’s lib was a capitalist plot to exploit the last supply of high quality cheap labor.
Women have always been in the workplace. For most of history, “liberation” meant finding a good provider so you could raise his family, freeing yourself from the drudgery of having to sell your labor to strangers.
Now, “women’s liberation” is how smart, attractive women get sinecures for themselves and get access to smart, high-status men. Not-so-smart, not-so-attractive women don’t do so well by it.
MR readers like marriage and hate unions so read this report and commence wriggling like eels.
Most leftist policies produce some positive benefit. The problem is that the cost far outweighs the benefit.
Why isn’t the relationship “marriage leads to support for unions because marriage is collectivism and women will rally with men to support bringing better pay, better benefits, and job security by collective community action”?
Conservatives have opposed collectivism in every form, especially in seeing women as equals in marriage, so women work twice as hard as men and then get abused for not cleaning house or going to work instead of quieting the screaming baby.
“Does union membership help cause marriage?” “cause”, Mr Cowen? Since when did a correlation prove cause?
-1
That is why it was a question.
The initial premiss is hog wash. I love this: “Scholars have shown how this decline is less a result of changing cultural definitions of marriage, and more a result of men’s changing access to social and economic prerequisites for marriage”.
1) I bet those “scholars” are Leftist propagandists, and what they are really up to here is deflecting and analysis on the Left’s war on normalcy, and that of course includes their war on (white) men. What a slick evasion of what is really going on. What pompous lies.
2) It is not “men’s current economic standing and men’s future economic security”, but the (again, white) Middle lass status, economic or otherwise.
3) What they are not telling you is that the only “Unions” that are getting any real membership at all are government and media Unions. Historical studies, particularly “longitudinal” one (what a laugh) cannot possibly be meaningful without taking this into account.
4) Why the focus on “men’s changing status”? Because they want to push the feminist agenda, that is why. In reality, once they destroy white men, they will turn on women in general, starting with white women.
So it is all just artfully constructed, pseudo-scientific propaganda–pure Marxist Leninist hooey, and it could have come out of any Russian university 40 years ago.
The Left makes war on us, and then gives us bogus nonsense like this to cover their track and no normalize their depredations.
If their project was chucked and they were placed in the margins as they would in any rational civilization, then there would be no clucking about “men’s economic status.
(And I am still chuckling about the “longitudinal” bit. It all goes to show how intellectually–and scientifically–backrupt and corrupted our national life has become, and most particularly so in academia.
you mad, bro?
“Traditionally, labor unions provided economic standing and security to male workers.”
Except for the non-members they kept unemployed. Except for the members without seniority they kept underemployed. Except for minorities who had no chance of membership. And so on.
Wow,the data shows that high union membership in the US happened at the same time as strong employment and high standards of living for the blue collar workers.
What factual evidence do you have to support your beliefs?
Are you seriously suggesting that your standard of living was higher 40 years ago?
Just out of curiosity, and completely unrelated to this question, would you care to tell me the size of your TV, the camera resolution on your cell phone and the MPG of your car from back then? Feel free to use Google to remind you (but of coursse only Google as it existed back then.)
Circuses.
The standard of living for blue collar high school grad autoworkers was astonishingly high: e.g., owning a second house just for fun. I can recall driving around the more scenic parts of Michigan in 1983 and being struck by the endless numbers of second homes on lakes owned by Detroit factory workers.
So Steve, how’d that work out for Detroit? Sustainable, would you say?
There was a great deal of wealth in Germany around 1941. Lots of rich men with second homes and so forth (many in various parts of Europe!). So the question is, does Naziism help cause marriage?
“Detroit”, the city, is irrelevant here. The auto industry was always more suburban than urban in Michigan (Henry Ford himself was a Dearborn resident). When people day “Detroit” in this context they really mean the LP of Michigan and maybe northwest Ohio in general.
Moore’s Law dates from 1968.
Except those jobs are for the most part not there anymore.
Employers preemptively paying higher wages and benefits to prevent unions from being formed, result in lower wages and higher unemployment among non-union employees?
Or are you arguing the high unemployment and low wages in the South in prior to 1900 was caused by the unions formed in the North after 1900, and the growth of a large middle class in the North with only 40% of all middle class workers in the North being union members is the reason the people in the South remained unemployed and low wage because the most ambitious workers moved from the South to the North?
With the decline of union power, the older and much wealthier Southern workers in the North and their educated and wealthier children are returning to the South with only modest hits to income but ending up much better off than those who remained in the union free South.
In economic history there is a wealth of evidence that age of first marriage is inversely related to economic well being.
So the findings that as standards of living have stagnated, and fallen for young men, I am not surprised that the age of marriage has lengthened.
But the decline in union membership is only one of many factors that have contributed to the great stagnation and most likely is a product of falling industrial employment and average wages more than anything. So I suspect that the decline of union membership is just a coincident factor, not a causal factor.
“controlling for many factors”
What exactly are those factors. The paper’s behind a paywall. The controls are really important here and the authors should have at least outlined them in the abstract. Seems like there’s *a lot* of potential covariates, from female post-secondary education (known to increase age of marriage) to personality (people with a propensity towards stability are more likely to settle for their first serious girlfriend). It’d be really hard to capture them all. A superior study would have used IV regression in a panel context, with legislative or judicial changes as the exogenous factor. I’d say this is C+ work at best.
I’d guess the authors are picking up quite a bit of spurious correlations.
Marriage rates per 1000 people in Texas and California are 7.1 and 5.8 respectively.
How do marriage rates compare in right to work states versus others?
It has to do with stable long term jobs, especially with two incomes being the expectation. In my acquaintance the men who have decent paying jobs, union or not, in a trade or occupation where there is a reliable demand, most are married with families. The construction jobs that pay well but involve travel or moving regularly are different, as will add the low paying or transient service jobs.
Right, the very young ages at which men were marrying in the 1950s, much younger than in the past, had a lot to do with unions and with the peculiar system where everybody got paid pretty much the same without much bonus for seniority. If you got a job at a GM factory at 19, you quickly were making the kind of wage that 40-year-old men found satisfactory. This had a lot to do with the Baby Boom of 1946-1964.
My impression is that most surviving union jobs, such as for government workers, have more of a seniority gradient for pay so it can take longer to reach maximum income than for a UAW worker in 1955.
In fact, I think younger men tended to make more in auto factories than older men because they’d voluntarily take on more overtime, which was the main way to make more money.
Not sure you are right about this. Younger guys love to party, and that hampers the work ethic (true today, was true yesterday, will be true tomorrow). Older (at least middle age) men are less into those excesses and tend to be more reliable and more willing to take on extra work (plus they are more skilled after years of experience). Additionally pensions tend(ed) to be based on recent income, giving those near retirement extra incentive to pad the timecard as much as they can. Finally overtime is/was often made available on a seniority basis: older workers get to claim it first.
Even in blue collar work people did tend to move up in pay as they accumulated skills (assuming they did so of course).
Very sly. Compare two rising quantities, union membership and marriage, and you will always get nice positive correlations. Conclusion: Union membership is good for the Society, because marriage is great.
Actually, marriage might have gone up for a while coincidentally to union membership. Or, there may be the reasonable fact that union membership raised salaries for union members and made them more marriageable. Good for them. That doesn’t show that unions sould be favored or subsidized. Successful bank robbers are also more attractive because of their increased incomes.
Unions raise wage costs for employers by excluding other workers who would work for less. Employers must pay more, raise their prices, and sell less, and so employ fewer people. We infer that the excluded workers will end up working for even less than the non-union wage, the one they would have worked for if not excluded by the union.
The result is higher prices and less production with less employment, and lower wages for non-union workers.
Will other employers pay more out of fear of being unionized? Unclear. But, should employers pay more because they are threatened by unions possessing special legal powers? I say no. We have the evidence of the Detroit auto plants, heavily unionized, losing money, and unable to support the pensions they negotiated under pressure.
Those auto companies are profitable in other countries where union power is less.
Economists are supposed to count all the costs and factors for what they study. Higher incomes lead to more marriage, OK. Unions are good because they give some people more income: they should analyze all the effects.
Concentrating on marriage seemingly gets them off the hook of studying all the effects of unionization. It is a dodge.
You mean other countries like Germany, right?
Except that the era we are talking about featured very low unemployment. Unions may have kept some few men out of union jobs, but those men generally found decent paying work anyway– because even non-unionized workplaces had to compete with roughly similar wages and benefits to attract employees. The difference was made up by depriving capital income– the period of union dominance was also the period of stock market stagnation, though at the time (when the 1920s and how they ended were still in living memory) that was seen as a feature by many people, not a bug.
Becoming a union member shows you are more willing to “plan commitment” ?
Bruce Springsteen was on to this as early as 1979:
“And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat.”
Demand for semi-skilled workers was high in the 1950s, when U.S. manufacturing had a huge share of the world (as well as domestic) market and where few industrial jobs had been automated.
These jobs had been unionized in the 1930s. The work may have been unpleasant but it paid well, and for many decades employment remained stable.
In other words, the causative factors here would be the unique position of the USA after WWII, mass-production manufacturing technology as it existed before electronic automation, and (as a distant third?) union membership.
Assuming that a world in which secure, high-wage, often lifetime employment was the norm could be re-created merely by unionization seems naive, as companies would still have to sell what this labor produced. At a minimum, this could exist only with massive protectionism, yet that in itself would kill the economies of scale possible with globalized markets (even aside from its other costs).
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