Public sector unionization and Black-White earnings inequality

To what extent does unionization reduce earnings disparities between Black and White workers in the public sector? Public sector union membership has become increasingly central for union membership and power in recent decades, and recent research shows that public sector unions are especially advantageous for the earnings of Black men and women. In the current paper, we use Current Population Survey data from 1983 to 2023 to critically interrogate the union earnings premium among Black and White public sector workers. Although we find that White women and Black men and women have higher union earnings premiums compared to White men, several critical caveats complicate main results. These differences are found prior to 2000, and the inclusion of individual fixed effects removes most of the difference. Moreover, these premiums are primarily found among higher educated workers, where education premia are much larger than union premia. Our results contribute to recent studies synthesizing stratification literature on race and ethnicity and stratification literature on labor.