Resident Mortality And Worker Infection Rates From COVID-19 Lower In Union Than Nonunion US Nursing Homes, 2020-21.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing home residents have accounted for roughly one of every six COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Nursing homes have also been very dangerous places for workers, with more than one million nursing home workers testing positive for COVID-19 as of April 2022. Labor unions may play an important role in improving workplace safety, with potential benefits for both nursing home workers and residents. We examined whether unions for nursing home staff were associated with lower resident COVID-19 mortality rates and worker COVID-19 infection rates compared with rates in nonunion nursing homes, using proprietary data on nursing home-level union status from the Service Employees International Union for all forty-eight continental US states from June 8, 2020, through March 21, 2021. Using negative binomial regression and adjusting for potential confounders, we found that unions were associated with 10.8 percent lower resident COVID-19 mortality rates, as well as 6.8 percent lower worker COVID-19 infection rates. Substantive results were similar, although sometimes smaller and less precisely estimated, in sensitivity analyses.

Iowa School Districts Were More Likely To Adopt COVID-19 Mask Mandates Where Teachers Were Unionized.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, safely reopening schools has been one of the most pressing public health challenges in the United States. At the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly encouraged schools to require mask wearing. Although teachers unions frequently supported such policies, the adoption of mask mandates was uneven. We examined whether teachers unions were associated with mask mandates, using proprietary data on school district-level unionization and mask mandates from the Iowa State Education Association, the state's main teachers union. We found that a 1-standard-deviation increase in the teachers' unionization rate was associated with a 12.5 percent relative increase in the probability that a school district adopted a mask mandate. These findings, which are robust to multiple specification checks, help illuminate an important mechanism by which labor unions have informed safety policies in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.