Heterogeneity in Union Status and Employee Wellbeing: Some New Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data

This paper examines if workplace and co-worker union status affect employee wellbeing. It departs from the standard approach in the literature by employing an innovative approach, which focuses principally on non-union employees. It uses two different measures of wellbeing, offering a richer framework than has been used in much of the literature. Using linked employer-employee data confined to the private sector and employing alternative econometric estimators, the paper finds that being in a union workplace and having union coworkers affect the job satisfaction of non-union employees negatively, lending some support to the sorting hypothesis. No such link is found with respect to affective wellbeing outcomes on the other hand.