Is there any reason why union membership is only available in ipums cps from 1984: I think BLS starting asking this question from 1973. It would be great to have the data going back further. Thanks.
IPUMS CPS offers unharmonized variables of union membership for all basic monthly data in 1983 and the 1971 ASEC. I spot-checked MORG files from NBER, reviewed UNICON documentation, and looked at ASEC codebooks and am not seeing evidence that these data are available. However, if you have more information on where you suspect union data are available in CPS, please let me know.
Greetings,
I was curious if there was any follow-up on extending union membership to years prior to 1983. My understanding is that Unicon data used May extract data from 1970 - 1982. Then MORG data was used from 1983 onward. It seems the 1983+ data is available, but not the May extract data.
It seems that May union membership data can be collected from:
The following article is an example of how folks have combined these sources in the past.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122411414817
Unionstats dot com (not linked, can’t seem to include 2+ links) is also a standard in social science research. It seems they have CPS union membership data beginning in 1973.
I’d love to grab all CPS data via ipums if possible. Working with the nber data reveals just how easy ipums makes data management for researchers!
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best,
Tom VanHeuvelen
Thanks for this additional detail on the pre-1983 files. Since my last post it looks like the IPUMS CPS team has done a little digging into this, though I don’t have a timeline for this work yet (my colleagues who would have this insight are currently out of the office). Please know that I have let the IPUMS CPS team know about your interest and will provide an update when I know more.