Decline In Union Membership Research Articles

Are Manufacturing Jobs Still Good Jobs? An Exploration of the Manufacturing Wage Premium

This paper explores the factors behind the disappearance of the manufacturing wage premium—the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing worker. With substantially larger declines across union members, we quantify the role of unionization by exploiting the heterogeneity in membership status across manufacturing industries. We find that the decline in union membership explains more than 70 percent of the decline in the wage premium since the 1990s for union members but does not affect nonunion premia. Our findings suggest that the erosion of “good” manufacturing jobs has contributed to the increase in overall wage inequality.

Explaining Union Decline: Remaking Power Relations in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry

How have scholars tried to explain marked union membership decline in the Global North, and how have they assessed consequent “union renewal” strategies? In this journal in 2020, Bowden argued that most accounts of unionism failed to explain decline, relied too much on state policy as causation and were too optimistic about those renewal strategies. One way to respond to these important general claims is to assess, as this article does, a striking and important local instance of decline and unsuccessful strategy – Pilbara unionism, once an archetype of mining workers’ power – and to do so over the entire history of an industry. In explaining the fall of the Pilbara mining unions, which for 20 years until 1986 had seemed so strong, “power resources” and geography itself were remade by capital in ways that were entwined with, but did not always rely on, state action. This argument recasts debate about decline in two ways: by drawing on a longer timeframe than is common in industrial relations scholarship and by adopting a more theoretically explicit, and inter-disciplinary, framing than is usual in the labour historiography addressing these issues. The explanation offered here shows how, after just 20 years of mining, union power in the Pilbara unravelled. Employer strategy, the precise nature and timing of state intervention, and the geographically textured nature of employer and union power explain the rise and fall of these unions.

Constructing solidarity through social justice in education: from collaboration and conflict to amalgamation between Swedish teacher unions

ABSTRACT Trade union collaboration on issues of social justice connects workers to each other and to their wider communities and is therefore considered a strategy of union renewal. Prior to their amalgamation on 1 January 2023, Lärarförbundet (Swedish Teachers’ Union) and Lärarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Teachers in Sweden) collaborated intermittently to challenge educational injustices in the highly segregated Swedish school market. Through documentary research, with dialogue as method, this case study explores the policies and politics of this inter-union collaboration. Using ‘framing’ and ‘intermediation’ as conceptual lenses, we argue that the two unions collaborated predominantly, but to varying degrees, on bargaining, political, and professional issues. However, these joint actions were conducted in the context of declining union membership, competitive national recruitment agendas, and the rise of grassroots teacher-led ‘rebellion’ groups campaigning for public education. External solidarity in organising was therefore limited by inter-organisational and intra-professional differentiation and both unions’ orientation towards a service model of unionism. Future research might explore the complexity of intra-union collaboration in the newly amalgamated Sveriges Lärare and the extent to which regional branch activism and broader alliances with social movements could promote a more democratic organising agenda.

The Impact of Union Transformational Leadership on Union Citizenship Behavior in the Vietnamese Union Context: A Moderated Mediation Model of Union Commitment and Union Practice

After implementing the Renovation policy in 1986, the transition to a market-oriented economy brought significant changes to the institutional environment in which trade unions operate. The decline in union membership prompted both union leaders and political authorities to recognize the potential difficulties in maintaining stability and the necessary cohesion for sustainable economic development. The absence of an effective trade union system became apparent, leading to the realization that understanding the role of trade unions in the context of economic transition is indeed essential. The present study aims to explore the relationship between union transformational leadership, union citizenship behavior, union practices and union commitment in a union context Vietnam. At the same time, build a model of the influence of union transformational leadership on union citizenship behavior, which commits unions to play an intermediary role and Vietnamese union practices plays a moderating role.  Data were collected on a sample of 595 union members from 15 foreign enterprises as a research sample. Research results show that transformational leadership style has a strong positive influence on behavior union citizenship through promoting union commitment and trade union practices. The research has important academic contributions and administrative implications for Vietnamese trade union leaders.

Disruption of the Ghent effect: Disentangling structural and institutional determinants of union membership decline in Sweden, 2005–2010

AbstractIn 2007–2008, Sweden implemented changes to the Ghent system of unemployment insurance, leading to union density decline. We study the interaction of labour force composition and institutional changes, finding that the structural tendencies of the decline strongly interacts with these changes, exposing previous precarious categories even further.

The Role of Federalism and the Centrality of State Governments for Labor Unions, Employment, and Organizing

Abstract American states differ in their protection of workers, acceptance of organized labor, dominant industrial cultures, and regarding labor unions’ capacity and political power. In this article, I examine declining union membership in the states and analyze various laws that limit the political power of unions and assess the consequences of these developments. I also document and explain a recent resurgence of labor organizing, political resistance, and work stoppages. There is a seeming contradiction between a labor movement that is both declining as well as gaining strength. However, a common theme in each of these trends is the centrality of state governments and politics regarding labor policy and union influence.

Workplace Domination and Labor Unions

Recent decades have seen a precipitous decline in union membership, with deleterious consequences for the working class. Yet political theorists have devoted little attention to unions. In this article, I argue that unions help solve collective action problems that otherwise stymie workers’ attempts to take industrial action and compel employers to take better account of their interests. Unions thereby afford workers a form of partial protection from domination. This has three important implications. First, insofar as workers have claims against subjection to domination, they must be afforded opportunities to unionize. Second, insofar as the ability of unions to afford workers such protection depends on their being able to credibly threaten industrial action, it is essential that unions and their members have the right to take such action. Finally, workers have duties to join the union that represents them and contribute to its legitimate activities. This lends support to various forms of compulsory unionization.

Trade Union Relationship with Corporate Management

The need to manage a good and coordinated relationship among employees is critical in human resource management. In order to achieve organizational goals, the relationships between individuals involved in the context must be well managed, especially if the context is broader and involves a union. This brief article will focus on the relationship within the union. The fundamental question here is, "How is the working relationship between the union and the company management?" This question's response elaborates on six main points. First, we'll talk about the nature of trade unions and the issues they face, including in Indonesia. Second, several factors contributing to the decline in union membership will be identified. Third, labor and trade union regulations will be explained. The fourth topic will be the stages of the union process. Fifth, the collective bargaining agreement will be discussed. The complaint procedure will be described in the sixth section.

What explains the increase in trade union density and female share of union members in the United Kingdom in 2017–2020?

Trade union density increased for three consecutive years in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2020. This contrasts with a general decline in union membership since 1979. Since union density continued to fall amongst male employees in 2017–2020, the overall increase was entirely attributable to females. This paper explores the factors which explain why there was an increase in overall union density after a period of decline (for males and females) and why union density evolved so differently for males and females. Using decomposition methodologies, we find that the increase in union density in 2017–2020 was not due to a higher propensity to unionise within particular groups or across all employees. Instead, the principal driver of the overall rise in 2017–2020 was an increase in the proportion of employment in certain public sector organisations. The largest contributor to the difference across males and females was increases in the share of employment in more unionised occupations amongst female employees and decreases amongst male employees.

IMPACT OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC POLICIES ON THE FUNCTIONING OF TRADE UNIONS IN INDIAN PUBLIC SECTOR ENTERPRISES

The impact of global economic policies on trade unions within India's public sector enterprises (PSEs), analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data to understand how globalization, privatization, and labor reforms have transformed union dynamics. Historically, Indian trade unions played a crucial role in advocating for workers' rights and were deeply integrated into PSEs, especially during India's state-led economic model. However, liberalization reforms introduced in the 1990s have redefined labor relations, reducing union bargaining power due to market-driven policies and privatization pressures. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, collecting quantitative data from surveys of 600 union members across PSE sectors and qualitative insights from interviews with union leaders, public sector managers, and policymakers. Quantitative findings indicate a 37.5% decline in union membership from 1990 to 2020, underscoring the adverse effects of global policies on union strength and worker protections. Regression analysis reveals a significant negative correlation between economic liberalization and union influence, reflecting increased job insecurity and skill mismatches due to automation and privatization. Qualitatively, thematic analysis of interviews reveals adaptive strategies adopted by unions, including reskilling initiatives, digital mobilization, and partnerships with global unions. These strategies underscore unions' shift from traditional collective bargaining to a broader focus on worker empowerment and skills development. The study concludes that while global economic policies challenge trade unions, they also present opportunities for strategic adaptation. Policymakers are encouraged to collaborate with unions to develop inclusive policies that balance economic growth with labor rights, fostering sustainable industrial relations. This research contributes to the discourse on labor resilience in a globalized economy, offering recommendations for unions and policymakers to navigate economic transformations effectively.

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Varieties of trade unions and support for redistribution

Many studies of cross-national survey data find that union members are more likely to be supportive of redistributive policies than respondents who are not union members. Analysing British, German and Swedish survey data, this article demonstrates that the union membership effect on support for redistribution varies depending on the kinds of unions to which individuals belong. Regardless of their own income, wage-earners who belong to unions whose membership encompasses a wide swath of the income distribution tend to be more supportive of redistribution than members of unions that are less inclusive. This suggests that the decline of union membership among poorly paid wage-earners—a common trend across OECD countries—has more far-reaching implications for the politics of redistribution than commonly recognised. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2048344 .

Are Manufacturing Jobs Still Good Jobs? An Exploration of the Manufacturing Wage Premium

<ns3:p>This paper explores the factors behind differences in wages between manufacturing and other sectors. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the manufacturing wage premium—the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing worker—disappeared in recent years and that the erosion of the premium has primarily affected workers employed in production occupations, who experienced a wage decline of 2.5 percentage points since the 1990s relative to other workers in production occupations. While the demographic composition and other worker observables introduce level differences in manufacturing premia, our analysis suggests that they are not responsible for the declining trends. A decomposition of the premium by union membership status reveals that declines have been substantially larger across union members. To quantify the role of unionization membership on wage premia, we exploit the heterogeneity in membership status across industries within manufacturing. We find that the decline in union membership explains more than 70 percent of the decline in premia since the 1990s for union members, but the declines in unionization rates have not significantly affected non-union premia, which have instead responded to other factors, such as capital intensity. Our findings suggest that the erosion of “good” manufacturing jobs has contributed to the increase in overall wage inequality and could accelerate the decline of the manufacturing sector.</ns3:p>

Labor Unions and Voter Turnout in the American States: Direct Versus Indirect Mobilization

AbstractI examine the relationship between labor unions and voter turnout in the American states. Though it is well known that unions increase turnout directly, we know less about their indirect effects. Moreover, the indirect effects may consist of nonmember mobilization and aggregate strength. To examine the direct and indirect mechanisms, I analyze both state-level panel data and individual-level data with a multilevel approach. First, my panel analysis shows that unions are positively associated with turnout as expected. Yet, the association is observed only in midterm elections, but not in presidential elections. Second, more importantly, my individual-level analysis suggests that indirect nonmember mobilization and indirect aggregate strength are positively related to turnout, while direct member mobilization is not. The findings imply that the direct effects are limited and, thus, that decreasing levels of voter turnout due to recently declining union membership come primarily from indirect mobilization rather than direct mobilization.

'Get Close To The Workers, Stay Close To The Workers': The Shift to Digital Organising During Covid-19

'Get Close To The Workers, Stay Close To The Workers':The Shift to Digital Organising During Covid-19 Nicole McPherson (bio) Like many trade unions, in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic the Finance Sector Union (FSU) had shifted from a servicing model of unionism to an organising model1. This had been an uneasy transition and remains a work in progress as unions continue to grapple with role that servicing plays in an organising union2. At the same time, unions are acknowledging that the organising model alone has not been sufficient to arrest the decline in union membership, and must to be supplemented with new ways of bringing people to their union3. Alongside this transition to an organising model of unionism has been a shift towards digital organising and campaigning. Australia's union peak body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has established the Innovation Hub to support digital innovation to achieve 'union growth and have a greater impact'4. Early steps saw the union employ digital marketers in the communications team (not the organising team) and saw digital as separate to 'real' organising The FSU was an early supporter of the ACTU Innovation Hub, and was eager to develop capacity for digital organising. It is instructive that in its move towards in digital organising, some of the first steps the FSU took were to implement new customer relationship management (CRM) software, and employ digital marketers and digital campaigners who sat in the communications team (not the organising team). This illustrates the FSU's early conception of digital organising as a communications channel and separate to 'real' organising. March 2020: Enter COVID-19 As COVID-19 cases rose in Australia in early 20205, many large employers started to direct their staff to work from home. FSU members working in Australian banks, insurance and superannuation firms were some of the earliest to be directed to work from home6. Many banks closed at least some of their retail branches, or reduced their operating hours7. Even where workers were still working on site, due to COVID-19 restrictions, Union organisers were generally not permitted to attend. It was no longer safe for organisers to be in the field. Until this time, FSU digital organising efforts were largely limited to email communications, and Facebook and WhatsApp groups for delegates to stay in touch. Certainly, for organising staff, their main organising methods involved getting into a car and going to speak to workers face to face. Organising was forced to shift from field to digital overnight. In mid-March, 2020, the FSU directed all of its staff to work from home indefinitely. The short time frame meant that the Union's focus was on the practical aspects of this shift-did the Union's staff have the hardware needed to work from home? In normal circumstances, the project to move staff to work remotely would have been a months-long undertaking, but like many organisations, the FSU achieved it in a matter of days when there was no alternative. What this meant though, was that there has been no opportunity to build the Union's digital organising capacity-neither of the organisers, nor of delegates and members. July 2020: Campaigning in COVID Throughout 2020 and 2021, public health directives dictated that many people work from home, but people performing 'essential' services were permitted to attend their usual place of work8. This created tension between people who were allowed (or required) to work safely from home, and those who had to expose themselves to COVID-19 by attending work in retail bank branches. At a Zoom meeting of Union members, a member suggested that people working in customer-facing environments should receive an additional payment to compensate for the increased risk they were facing. After testing the idea with members, the FSU created a petition to call on Australia's largest banks to provide a $5 per hour essential allowance to all frontline finance workers9. The immediate challenge was bringing members into this campaign without the ability to visit them. Calling people individually lacked scale. Broadcast email enabled broad but shallow engagement. In a...

Three decades of research on innovation and inequality: Causal scenarios, explanatory factors and suggestions

Prompted by rising income inequality (in short, inequality) in advanced economies, a rapidly growing number of studies across various fields and disciplines of social science have, since the 1990s, sought to find out how innovation (as the main engine of economic progress) affects the distribution of income in modern-day capitalist societies. Using the systematic literature review method, this paper provides the first critical review of 166 studies on innovation and inequality published in 114 journals in the last three decades (1990–2019). It is shown that, while the great majority of studies under review concur that innovation induces inequality, this finding is subject to the disciplinary origins of research (e.g., development studies, economics, geography, innovation studies, etc.) and the country under investigation. Furthermore, guided by an original causally holistic analytical framework, the analysis demonstrates that the relationship between innovation and inequality is significantly more causally complex than the most popular theoretical perspective (i.e., skill-biased technological change account) has let us believe; in particular, it is subject to five causal scenarios and a range of explanatory factors (i.e., skill premiums, technological unemployment, international trade, declining union membership, spatial aspects, changing employment conditions, policy, horizontal inequalities, sectoral composition and types of innovation). The paper ends by discussing findings, policy implications and knowledge gaps, one of which concerns the following under-researched question: how, and under what conditions do publicly funded innovation policies reduce (or increase) inequality?

Hero or Villain? A Cohort and Generational Analysis of How Youth Attitudes Towards Unions Have Changed over Time

AbstractOur study examines youth attitudes towards unions over a 40‐year period to try and understand whether today's young workers might be the ‘hero’ or the ‘villain’ in the tale of declining union membership rates in the United States. Using nationally representative time‐lag data from high‐school seniors (N = 104,742) spanning 1976–2015, we conducted time trend, birth cohort and generational analyses to provide an ‘apples to apples’ comparison of how youth have felt about unions at different points in time. We found that contemporary youth (or Millennials) hold similar union attitudes to those who came before them, though what predicts those attitudes has changed over time. Strikingly, we also found that the proportion of young people who hold no opinion about unions has more than doubled over the period under study, steadily rising from 14 per cent in 1976 to 33 per cent in 2015. This sizeable proportion of ‘agnostic’ youth should be alarming to unions, yet it also provides them with opportunities to shape youth attitudes through targeted outreach efforts.

Union membership reduces racism

Political Science Historical research has suggested that the advent of unions created social ties that may have reduced white workers' racism toward their African American co-workers. Frymer and Grumbach used national survey data in the United States to show that union membership is associated with reduced negative racial attitudes among white workers toward African Americans. They then used longitudinal data to show that gaining union membership predicts reductions in negative racial attitudes. Compared with nonunionized workers, unionized workers also support more policies that would benefit African Americans. These data have implications for understanding the interplay of declining union membership and racism in the United States. Am. J. Pol. Sci. 10.1111/ajps.12537 (2020).

Labor Unions and White Democratic Partisanship

The Democratic Party’s declining support among white voters is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. Extant research has emphasized factors such as elite polarization and demographic change but has overlooked another important trend, the decades-long decline of labor union membership. This oversight is surprising, given organized labor’s long ties to the Democratic Party. I argue that the concurrent decline of union membership and white support for the Democratic Party is not coincidental, but that labor union affiliation is an important determinant of whites’ partisan allegiances. I test this using several decades of cross-sectional and panel data. I show that union-affiliated whites are more likely to identify as Democrats, a substantively significant relationship that does not appear to be driven by self-selection. Overall, these findings underscore the political consequences of union decline and help us to better understand the drivers of declining white support for the Democratic Party.

Wage and employment determination in a dynamic insider–outsider model

In this paper, I develop a differential insider–outsider game in which a union of corporative incumbents chooses the wage of its members by taking into account the optimal employment policy of a firm that, in turn, is assumed to decide the number of outsiders to hire in a spot labour market. Under the assumption that incumbents cannot be fired and commit themselves to a given path of wages, I demonstrate that such a game displays an open-loop Stackelberg equilibrium in which the initial stock of insiders pins down the trajectories of incumbents, entrants and insider wages. Moreover, resorting to numerical simulations, I show that adjustments towards the steady-state equilibrium occur through asymmetric oscillations that mimic the decline of union membership and union wage premia observed in the US all over the last 20 years. In addition, I show that the model provides a positive relationship between the labour market power of the insider union and the impatience of the firm.