Labor Unions and Covid-19: Beyond the Workplace

Abstract

Person-to-person transmission in the workplace is thought to play a crucial role in the spread of COVID-19. Labor unions are among the largest institutions in the United States, and their role in regulating employee-employer relations is hard to ignore. Costly efforts to contain the virus combined with the monopoly and collective voice faces of unions emphasize the role of unions in shaping the workforce’s response to the pandemic, where the effects can be amplified by the further transmission of the virus beyond the workplace. We utilize state-level data and a dynamic spatial probability model to quantify the total effect of both economic activities and union membership. We find that increasing economic activity by recruiting 1,000 new employees from unemployed individuals would lead to 368 more COVID-19 cases by November 2020 and before the vaccine rollout. However, increasing the union size by 1,000 while keeping the employment level constant would lead to 111 fewer COVID-19 cases in the same period.