Trade Union Membership and Sickness Absence: Evidence from a Sick Pay Reform

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. In 1996, statutory sick pay was reduced for private sector workers in Germany. Using the empirical observation that trade union members are dismissed less often than non-members, we construct a model to predict how absence behaviour will respond to the sick pay reform. Terms of use: Documents inWe show that union members may have stronger incentives to be absent and to react to the cut in sick pay. In the empirical investigation, we find a positive relationship between trade union membership and absence due to sickness and observe more pronounced reactions to the cut in sick pay among union members than among non-members. These findings suggest that more flexibility in the use of paid absence due to sickness constitutes a private gain from trade union membership.JEL-Code: I180, J510, J220.Keywords: difference-in-differences, sickness-related absence, Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), statutory sick pay, trade union membership. We are grateful to Nicolas Ziebarth for helpful comments and for providing background information on industry-specific bargaining contracts. Also, special thanks to Laszlo Goerke

Sickness Absence and Works Councils: Evidence from German Individual and Linked Employer–Employee Data

“…With regard to the control variables (see Table in the ), the estimated coefficients are generally in line with results based on SOEP data (Goerke and Pannenberg ; Puhani and Sonderhof ; Ziebarth and Karlsson ) . When comparing the size of the estimated coefficients of the works council dummy across the different specifications depicted in Table , it can be observed that they decline by about a third (30 percent) in the incidence (duration) specification when including, for example, firm and industry characteristics.…”

“…Turning to the control variables, we take standard confounding factors into account (Goerke and Pannenberg ; Puhani and Sonderhof ; Ziebarth and Karlsson , ). Accordingly, we control for personal characteristics such as disability status, being female, marital status, living with a partner, being of foreign nationality, having a foreign background (immigrant), subjective general health status (good, bad), having children under the age of 14, age, educational attainment, satisfaction with current health status, and twelve regional dummies .…”

Trade union membership and paid vacation in Germany

“…Goerke and Pannenberg (2011), for example, show that trade union members in Western Germany are less likely to be dismissed individually than non-members. In addition, Goerke and Pannenberg (2015) estimate that union members take about a day more of sickness-related absence annually than non-members. This effect is quantitatively comparable to the estimated OLS-vacation differential between members and non-members.…”

Sickness Absence, Sick Leave Pay, and Pay Schemes

“…It is important to control for union membership, as several studies have shown that union workers are more absent‐prone than non‐union workers (Goerke and Pannenberg, ; Mastekaasa, ).…”