Union Influence, Corporate Interests, and Labor Policy: Essays on Labor and Employment Politics

Abstract

The papers in this dissertation explore the competing influence of unions and business at various levels of the political process, from individual attitudes and voting behavior to federal policymaking. We know from a large body of work that businesses aggressively lobby the government to advocate for policy on a wide range of issues. We also know that unions, although considerably weaker than they once were, have vigorously fought to oppose the business lobby’s agenda in order to improve labor standards, particularly for their own members. In the first paper, “Politicization and Polarization at the NLRB,” I contribute original data-sets on the employment histories and decisions of presidentially appointed oofficials at the NLRB since the founding of the agency in 1935. I find that appointees with management backgrounds are more likely to make pro-business decisions while those with union backgrounds are more likely to make pro-labor decisions; although those with union backgrounds only appear in the last two decades. The second paper, "Labor vs. Big Business: interest groups, cue-taking, and voting behavior," shifts the focus to the mass public to explore the implications of a California proposition in which the majority of Democrats voted for a pro-employer independent contractor policy. I theorize that voters were persuadable due to the low attitude crystallization and a new information environment with respect to independent contractor status as a policy issue. I find support for the theory in an experiment in which I expose Democrats to a series of cue-taking treatments from businesses and labor unions regarding legislation on an independent contractor status policy or a paid family/medical leave program. Finally, in "Republicans for Labor? State-level Labor Power and Senate Policy-making," I examine the influence of unions on potentially pivotal actors in the U.S. Congress. I construct a dataset of employment legislation from 1970 to 2021 to examine the influence of state-level unionization rates on Republican Senators’ votes. I use an instrumental variable design to provide causal estimates of this influence, the results of which suggest that unionization is strongly predictive of whether Republicans will side with Democrats in favor of more progressive employment policies.