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.

中文翻译：

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工会是否增加了继续教育的参与度？

教育与技术之间的竞争是工会面临的一个关键问题。工会通常包括集体谈判方面的技能提升和培训，这可能是促进终身学习的重要工具。在本文中，我使用挪威匹配的全职工人雇主-雇员面板数据和固定效应框架，研究工会如何影响工人参与继续教育。与大多数现有的或多或少依赖代表性调查的研究不同，我们的数据涵盖了 16 年期间的整个工作人口，使我们能够控制未观察到的个体异质性。据估计，工作场所工会密度的增加将提高个人参加高等教育的倾向。我还发现，工会机构的工人在继续教育期间享有较高的工资，但培训后的工资溢价较低。此外，工会还被发现可以降低员工流动率。总之，这些发现为 Acemoglu 和 Pischke（1999）的理论预测提供了实证支持，即在劳动力市场缺乏完全竞争的情况下，企业可能会最优地选择资助工人技能投资。