Unionised workers stands to lose from globalisation, according to research by
Kjell Erik Lommerud, Frode Meland and Lars Sørgard. But their analysis,
published in the October 2003 Economic Journal, indicates that the problem
will be job losses rather than wage cuts.
An anti-globalisation crusader may conclude that this is an argument against
trade liberalisation. A right-wing twist is to argue that union power is more
hurtful to an economy when the global economy gets more integrated.
Many take for granted that trade liberalisation threatens the welfare of
unionised labour. But the conventional wisdom sees the threat as being wage
cuts; these researchers see a more mixed picture, arguing that the problem is
more one of job losses.
It is clear that high wages for unionised labour may trigger capital flight, where
firms move production abroad. More surprisingly, the research finds that trade
liberalisation as such may lead to even more capital flight. This is a surprise
because we would expect trade liberalisation to favour exports rather than
moving production abroad.
Moreover, the researchers find that the capital flight can be larger than what is
ideal from a national welfare perspective. The reason is that firms invest
abroad to win the distributional battle with unions in their home country.
Moving some production abroad means that some high paid workers at home
are replaced by some low paid workers abroad. But the workers that are able
to keep their jobs in the unionised home country may actually get higher
wages than before the capital flight.
The research extends work by Robin Naylor of the University of Warwick on
trade liberalisation and wages. His analysis notes that firms with market
power tend to keep output down to keep prices up. If reduced trade costs
(from liberalisation) increase the degree of competition in an international
oligopoly, this is bad for the firms involved, but their workers may profit.
Increased competition means higher sales volumes: each firm loses in its
home market, but the loss is more than offset by sales in the foreign market.
Labour demand can therefore be expected to increase, which gives a union
the chance to have both higher wages and higher employment.
The analysis in this study looks at trade liberalisation in a unionised
international oligopoly. Unions are assumed to be strong in the ‘home country’
but not in the ‘foreign country’. The focus is on capital flight. At a fixed cost, a
firm can relocate production for the foreign market to that country. At a higher
fixed cost, the whole production can be moved abroad.
In this set-up, things look much less rosy for unionised labour. Trade
liberalisation leads to higher sales abroad, and if this production took place at
home, wages would be driven up. But this means that it becomes more
profitable to shift parts or the whole of productive capacity abroad.
This is an inefficiency: precisely when it becomes more cost-efficient to serve
international markets from a home base, production moves out – so that
owners can win a distributional battle with their labour force.
ENDS
Notes for Editors: ‘Unionisation, Trade Liberalisation and Location Choice’
by Kjell Erik Lommerud, Frode Meland and Lars Sørgard is published in the
October 2003 issue of the Economic Journal.
Lommerud and Meland are at the University of Bergen; Sørgard is at the
Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.
For Further Information: contact RES Media Consultant Romesh Vaitilingam
on 0117-983-9770 or 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com); or
Sørgard via email on lars.sorgard@nhh.no.