The role of the desire for union status in the decision to enter local government job queues: the US evidence

Abstract

Following a two-stage bivariate probit approach, this study estimates local government and union job queues in a simultaneous equations framework. By relaxing the restrictive assumption of independence between the worker's queuing and the employer's hiring decisions, it overcomes a major limitation of most of the earlier job queue estimates. The results indicate that the worker's queuing decision for local government jobs in the United States is determined partly by the desire for unionized employment. The converse, however, is not true. Seniority with the current employer emerges as a significant determinant of both workers'queuing and employers' hiring decisions. Furthermore, local governments act as ‘model employers’ by being more likely to hire minorities and females from the pool of job applicants.