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Log on anytime during our Virtual Information Session to learn about the Rutgers Master's Program in Labor and Employment Relations (MLER) or one of our graduate certificate programs. Meet with Program Director Francis Ryan and members of our student support team to learn about the program and to ask your individual questions.

Log on anytime during our Virtual Open House to learn about the top-tier ranked Rutgers Graduate Program in Human Resource Management. Hear from current students and recent graduates about how you can take advantage of opportunities within our program to build your career in Human Resources. 

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We study the role of union heterogeneity in shaping wages and inequality among unionized workers. Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil and job moves across multi-firm unions, we estimate over 4,800 union-specific pay premia. Unions explain 3–4% of earnings variation. While unions raise wages on average, the standard deviation in union effects is large (6-7%). Validating our approach, wages fall in markets with higher vs. lower union premia following a nationwide right-to-work law. Linking premia to detailed data on union attributes, we find that unions with strike activity, collective bargaining agreements, internal competition, and skilled leaders secure higher wages. High-premium unions compress wage gaps by education while the average union exacerbates them. Post right-to-work, however, worker support for high-premium unions falls when between-group bargaining differentials are large. Our findings show that unions are not a monolith—their structure and actions shape their wage effects and, consequently, worker support.

While it is well-known that spillovers occur between workplaces and civic society, examinations are largely limited to employee voice effects on distal acts like voting. Spillovers between broader employment experiences and socio-politically extreme belief formation are less developed.  We theorize that positive employment experiences reduce individual-level socio-politically extreme beliefs through control loss mitigation, anxiety reductions, and exposure to new perspectives. We also propose heterogeneous job empowerment effects.