Homepage for LORS Data (Labor Organization Reporting System)

Posted June 2007

 

by

Thomas J. Holmes

University of Minnesota, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and NBER

holmes@umn.edu

 

This page provides links to data from the Labor Organization Reporting System (LORS) that I have collected.  The data is described in Holmes and Walrath (2007).  That paper used the raw data posted here.  The paper did some cleaning of the data and the cleaned files used in the paper are also listed at the bottom of this file.  This work was funded by NSF grant SES 0136842.

 

The data contains basic information about union organizations drawn from reports the organizations were required to file on an annual basis (All labor organizations representing private sector employees have been required to do this under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959).  The data is presented at the level of a “snapshot” at a point in time.  There is a organization identified, the variable F_NUMBER, which permits the records to be linked over time.

 

The files for 1960, 1971, 1980, and were created by scanning in the Register of Reporting Labor Organizatons for these years. I further processed the raw data by obtaining the FIPS codes of the county and place where the labor organization is located. 

 

The files for 2000 and after were obtained from the National Archives and directly from the Labor Management Services Organization of the Department of Labor.

 

The files are in SAS data set format as well as fixed length ASCII format. The zip file containing the ASCII file contains programs to convert the file to other formats.  From the programs, the variable names and column lengths can be determined.  I used STAT/Transfer to convert the file from SAS to and ASCII file.  I recommend STAT/Transfer for converting between various formats. 

 

Summary of Raw Data Sets

File

Description

Link to SAS file

Link to ASCII file

Documentation

Link to Contents/Summary and

LORS1960

Scanned in LORS data from 1960 Register

lors1960_sas

lors1960_ascii

documentation

LORS1960_contents.html

LORS1971

Scanned in LORS data from 1971 Register

lors1971_sas

lors1971_ascii

documentation

LORS1971_contents.html

LORS1980

Scanned in LORS data from 1980 Register

lors1980_sas

lors1980_ascii

documentation

LORS1980_contents.html

LORS1990

Scanned in LORS data from 1990 Register

lors1990_sas

lors1990_ascii

documentation

LORS1990_contents.html

LORS2000

Obtained from the National Archives.  The National Archives lists this as the 1999 file as it contains records processed up to 12/20/1999.  I am calling this the 2000 file as it is current up for 1/1/2000.

lors2000_sas

lors2000_ascii

see documentation for LORS2006

 

LORS2006

Obtained from Labor Management Services Administration 1/26/2006

lors2006_sas

lors2006_ascii

LORS2006_ documentation

 

LORS2007

Obtained from Labor Management Services Administration 2/27/2007

lors2007_sas

lors2007_ascii

LORS2007_ documentation

 

 

Clean Data Used in Holmes and Walrath (2007). 

This paper cleaned up LORS2000 and LORS2007 as discussed in the Data Appendix.

SAS versions of the cleaned data can be found at dat2000 and dat2007