Labor in the public and nonprofit sectors / edited by Daniel S. Hamermesh

The studies in this book were presented at a Conference on Labor in Nonprofit Industry and Government held at Princeton Uni versity on May 7-8, 1973. The Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University and the Manpower Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor, under Grant Number 21-34-73-27, sponsored the conference jointly. The points of view or opinions stated in these papers do not necessarily represent the official position or policy of the Department of Labor or the Industrial Relations Section. The Princeton University Conference Office helped in planning the conference.

The rise in government's share of total expenditure and employ ment has been especially rapid since World War II. Perhaps even more striking and surely more sudden has been the burgeoning of unions in the public sector. Not only has the extent of unionism grown since the early 1960's but union militance, as indicated by the number of man-days lost in strikes, has increased even more. Before 1964 no more than 100,000 man-days of work were lost annually because of strikes by public employees; between 1965 and 1969, the figure averaged nearly 1,000,000 man-days. It is thus clear that problems of labor in this sector are of increased importance.

While there has been substantial study of the institutions of collective bargaining in the public sector and personnel problems there, this sector has received little special attention from analytical economists. This is surprising, since the many issues relating to the demand for labor and the effects of unions should be as amenable to theoretical and empirical work as they have been in the private sector. The purpose of this conference was precisely to begin to fill this gap in the extension of analytical economics to problems of employment in the public sector. By collecting in one place the results of ongoing research on various policy problems in the public sector, we hoped to stimulate other and more detailed studies of these problems by economists.