The potential impact of unionization on excellence
We chose the name "UW Excellence" for this website because of our concern that unionization may diminish our excellence by damaging the environment in which our diverse activities flourish. A new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research echoes this concern.
NBER used publicly available data to characterize unionization supporters and opponents at the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota on various dimensions. The paper is dense, but the final paragraph is crystal clear:
"Finally, our results have implications for possible impacts of unionization on universities’ pursuit of their research mission. More productive researchers are less supportive of unionizing their universities. To put this another way, the workplace attribute of having a union is one that our results indicate is less appealing to more research-productive scholars. This raises the possibility that universities that unionize will face difficulty attracting and retaining the most productive scholars."
We chose the name "UW Excellence" for this website because of our concern that unionization may diminish our excellence by damaging the environment in which our diverse activities flourish. A new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research echoes this concern.
NBER used publicly available data to characterize unionization supporters and opponents at the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota on various dimensions. The paper is dense, but the final paragraph is crystal clear:
"Finally, our results have implications for possible impacts of unionization on universities’ pursuit of their research mission. More productive researchers are less supportive of unionizing their universities. To put this another way, the workplace attribute of having a union is one that our results indicate is less appealing to more research-productive scholars. This raises the possibility that universities that unionize will face difficulty attracting and retaining the most productive scholars."