Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Sociology

This dissertation consists of three studies of worker power and economic inequality. The studies extend inequality research by assessing the impacts of worker bargaining power on two less commonly examined outcomes: household wealth and employer-provided fringe benefits. I conceptualize and measure several types of worker power, spanning marketplace and associational forms, measured at the individual, local-regional, and institutional scales. The studies broaden theories of how worker bargaining power influences the wage and income distributions to the case of wealth and fringe benefits. In the first chapter, I examine the relationship between labor union coverage and household wealth accumulation and inequality. Informed by life course theories of cumulative advantage, I develop novel measures of cumulative exposure to unionization across the career. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79) and fixed-effects regression, I find that cumulative career union coverage supports wealth accumulation. This positive association is driven by the influence of union coverage on the accumulation of savings and durable assets. Unconditional quantile regression models reveal that career union coverage is more strongly associated with increases in wealth for low- and middle- than high-wealth individuals. Results suggest worker power is associated with a more equal distribution of wealth and that deunionization contributed to rising wealth inequality among this cohort. The second chapter advances research on the determinants of job quality by considering the effects of worker power on fringe benefit offers. Using uniquely comprehensive data on benefits in the NLSY-79, I leverage changes in union coverage status due to involuntary job displacements (layoffs and business closures) to estimate the effects of unionization on the number of fringe benefits made available to workers by their employers. I find that transitioning to a union job i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel E. Dwyer (Advisor); Stephanie Moulton (Committee Member); Vincent J. Roscigno (Committee Member); Michael Vuolo (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology