“Sindicatos & desigualdad”

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the rise in inequality in the industrialized world has led to a major research initiative to investigate its underlying causes. Given the empirical observation that inequality increases as unionization declines, labor unions have drawn notable attention as a driving force behind this phenomenon. By employing a widely-adopted reweighting and variance decomposition technique, this paper estimates the overall and component-specific effects of unions on inequality within and across skill groups in a highlyunequal developing country, Chile, at four points in time over a three-decade period. The main findings show that unions have a negative, albeit modest, effect on wage variance, which is larger for females than males, in line with the increase in unionization among women over the period. The largest effect of unions occurs within-skill groups for females and betweenskill groups for male workers, suggesting a comparatively stronger wage-flattening effect among men. Overall, the findings of this paper suggest that unions may have a stronger incidence in wage inequality in the presence of higher unionization. This study also finds evidence supporting the view that female unionization has positive effects on reducing the male wage premium.