The paper studies how the personal career of union (or worker) representatives is tied to the conditions in which revenues are shared between labor and capital at the firm-level. We argue that employers can have a strategic interest in either favoring or discriminating against union representatives in order to lower workers' bargaining power.
- Speaker
- Date
- Friday 27 Jun 2025, 12:00 - 13:15
- Type
- Seminar
- Room
- 3-12
- Building
- Langeveld Building
The behaviour of union representatives during firm negotiations and the stake of those negotiations influence employers' willingness to use one or the other of those strategies. We formalize this theory with a model and provide evidence to support it using a rich survey for France in 2017 combined with administrative data on earnings and firm performance. Together, the results show that employers' capacity to affect representatives' careers can impair the quality of workers' representation and workers' ability to organise collectively in order to take part in the firm decision-making process.
About the speaker
Thomas is Associate member at Paris School of Economics, Full-time senior researcher at CNRS, and Program Director (Labor) at the Institute of Public Policies. He is a top researcher in labor economics, focusing on employment relations, taxation, and gender inequality.
Registration
If you are interested in a bilateral, or joining for lunch on Friday or dinner on Thursday, please send an email to boring@ese.eur.nl.
See also
- More information
Read more about the paper 'Labor Facing Capital in the Workplace: The Role of Worker Representatives' (pdf)
