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A claim was made today by an equipment manufacturing industry representative that in the last 10 years Non-Union labor had far out paced Union labor in productivity gains and that Non-Union Shops where now significantly more productive than Union Shops.

Are there any statistics that can confirm or refute this?

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More productive in what sense? It seems productivity could be measured in terms of production per hour, production per salary-dollar, production per day, production per employee, or perhaps other metrics, and you may get vastly different results. – Flimzy Oct 20 '11 at 20:39
@Flimzy - I suppose that is true and the point of the rep staying vague probably easier to side step challenges to the vague claim. I just find it difficult to actually believe that there is any significant difference consistently favoring one over the other for similar work. – Chad Oct 20 '11 at 20:53
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I used to work in a union aircraft manufacturing plant. I wasn't a union employee, as I worked in IT. The culture prevalent in the plant, to the extent I could pick it up, was one of laziness. You might say there was a "I don't have to work, because I can't get fired" sort of attitude. So I can see, based on this anecdotal experience, that production in a union shop might suffer. But this is a far cry from any sort of statistical claim. – Flimzy Oct 20 '11 at 20:57
Related to @Flimzy's first comment, if one manufacturer can produce items 20% cheaper, but has twice as many workplace deaths per year by taking safety shortcuts, does that factor into productivity measurements? Other confounding factors include plant-size (are bigger plants more likely to be unionised?) – Oddthinking Oct 21 '11 at 2:41
@Oddthinking - If a bigger plant is more likely to be unionized I would expect it to be more productive anyway with the economics of scale. But yes it would not be apples to apples to compare a small company assembling boxes to a complex machine assembly plant. And most any business analyst will show that (at least in the US) it is much more productive to work safely. And the more skill and training involved in the position the greater the effect. – Chad Oct 21 '11 at 13:29
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