Abstract
The post–World War II period of wage compression provides a strong contrast to the last forty years of rising inequality. In this article, I argue that inequality was previously constrained by pay coordination that spanned multiple workplaces. Cross-workplace coordination practices range from multi-employer bargaining agreements to informal employer collusion. To quantify the influence of these practices on inequality, I draw on establishment-level Bureau of Labor Statistics microdata from 1968 to 1977. Inequality between workplaces did not increase during the 1970s and inequality was lower among workers likely to be covered by cross-workplace coordination. Unionization, large establishments, and pension provision reduced inequality across workplaces, not only among coworkers within workplaces. These findings indicate that cross-workplace coordination mitigated inequality during the postwar period of egalitarian economic growth.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Wilmers, Nathan. 2019. “Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(4): 190–215. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.4.07. Thank you to Tom Kochan, Tom VanHeuvelen, David Howell, Arne Kalleberg, and participants at the RSF job quality workshop for very helpful comments. Direct correspondence to: Nathan Wilmers at wilmers{at}mit.edu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 100 Main St., Cambridge, MA 02142.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.