Protective Service Unions, Political Activities, and Bargaining Outcomes

We examine how electoral political activities by police and firefighter unions impact police and firefighter wages and employment. Thefindings indicate that the significant union-nonunion wage and employment differentials generally associated with a collective bargaining agreement decrease when controlling for union involvement in electoral politics. Though some differences were observed between police and firefighters, electoral political activities appear to be important determinants of protective service wages and employment. Since the dramatic growth in public sector unionism that began in the 1960s, scholars in labor relations and public administration have been interested in the impact of public sector unions on wages and employment (Ehrenberg and Schwarz 1986; Freeman 1986; Menthe and Perry 1980). Scholars doing work in this area generally have estimated a reduced form of the demand and supply equations for municipal labor markets with a single dummy variable included to represent the presence of a public sector union (Ehrenberg and Schwarz 1986). These studies found that public sector unions have a positive, or at least a nonnegative, effect on wages and employment. Recent studies have expanded the measures used to capture the effects of public sector unions. Zax (1988), for example, categorized union strength using department-specific union characteristics and bargaining practices in the municipality; he concluded that union-nonunion compensation differentials "increase as employees move through organization into recognition, and as cities move from non-bargaining to bargaining" (p. 315). Similarly, studies by Zax and Ichniowski (1988) and Zax (1989) The authors thank Peter Feuille, Paul Jarley, and Larry Kahn for their helpful comments and suggestions, and Chris Parker and Deanna Ross for their excellent research assistance. Timothy D. Chandler thanks the Council on Research at Louisiana State University for research support. J-PART, 5(1995):3:295-318 295/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 207.46.13.134 on Thu, 12 May 2016 06:42:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Protective Service Unions included multiple measures of a union's presence to measure its impact on various employment-related issues. They found that unions that engage in collective bargaining with a municipality have greater effects on wages, employment, and departmental expenditures than do unions that do not engage in collective bargaining. Despite advancements in the union impact literature, few studies included measures of union political activities in the analyses.' This represents an important gap in the literature, because the effects of public employee unions on wages and employment are generally attributed to some combination of public sector unions' multilateral bargaining and political power (e.g., Freeman 1986; Zax 1989; Zax and Ichniowski 1988). The importance of public sector unions' political activities to union power is rooted in the very nature of the governmental process. Because of the division of governmental power across various branches of government in the United States and the often conflicting priorities of government officials regarding issues raised in collective bargaining, multilateral bargaining characterizes public sector contract negotiations.2 Unions can exploit this situation "by inducing officials with interests similar to their own to actively represent their position in the management policymaking process" (Kochan 1974, 530). In addition, public employee unions can engage in political activities to influence electoral outcomes, thereby ensuring that government officials will be favorably disposed to their demands. In this article, we examine how police and firefighter unions' electoral political activities impact police and firefighter wages and employment. The findings could have important implications for government administrators who must contain labor costs in order to cope with increasing financial constraints (Toulmin 1988). If union political activities are important determinants of positive union-nonunion wage and employment differentials, containment of union labor costs may not be simply an administrative matter that can be accomplished through hard bargaining in contract negotiations. Containment of the cost of government services may require the emergence of taxpayer groups capable of countering the political power of public employee unions.