Do unions increase participation in further education?

Abstract

The race between education and technology is a key issue for trade unions. Unions often include skill upgrading and training in collective bargains, which might be an important tool to facilitate lifelong learning. In this article, I investigate how trade unions influence workers’ participation in further education using Norwegian-matched employer–employee panel data on full-time workers and a fixed-effects framework. In contrast to most existing studies, which rely on more or less representative surveys, our data comprise the entire working population over a period of 16 years, allowing us to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. An increase in the workplace union density is estimated to raise the individual propensity to participate in tertiary vocational education. I also find that workers in unionized establishments enjoy higher salaries during further education but at the expense of lower post-training wage premiums. In addition, unions are found to lower employee turnover. Together, these findings give empirical support to the theoretical prediction of Acemoglu and Pischke (1999), where firms may optimally choose to sponsor investments in workers’ skills in the absence of perfect competition in the labour market.