Union membership and density: Some (not so) stylized facts and challenges

Abstract

This article surveys recent data and empirical literature on (trends in) unionization and its determinants in advanced countries. There are some robust stylized facts, for instance that unionization is positively related to public sector employment, establishment size, and the business cycle. Union-administered unemployment insurance and union presence at the workplace also play a positive role. However, some seemingly obvious explanations for union decline -such as economic globalization and changes in economic structure and workforce composition -do not seem to have impeded union membership everywhere; nor has the decentralization of collective bargaining. It also remains an open question whether changes in social values and employee attitudes towards unions have affected unionization negatively.

Hiring Discrimination Against Pro-union Applicants: The Role of Union Density and Firm Size

“…Therefore, we conduct a regression analysis in which we attempt to take into account potential confounders of the impact of union density and firm size on discrimination of pro-union candidates. In this respect, Schnabel (2013) shows that union density is positively related to the business cycle (i.e., growing procyclically), public sector employment and firm size. Given the short period of our experiment and the fact that we only selected vacancies in the private sector, the relationship between union density and discrimination against pro-union applicants we find may not be confounded with the correlation between union density on the one hand and business cycle and public nature of the sector on the other hand.…”

“…Given the short period of our experiment and the fact that we only selected vacancies in the private sector, the relationship between union density and discrimination against pro-union applicants we find may not be confounded with the correlation between union density on the one hand and business cycle and public nature of the sector on the other hand. However, Schnabel's (2013) evidence underlines the importance of including both union density and firm size within one regression specification. Table 2 and Table 3 present our regression results.…”

Crisis económica y deterioro de los pactos sociales en el sur de Europa: Los casos de España y Portugal

“…Los problemas de debilidad institucional se han sumado a la flaqueza organizativa de los agentes sociales españoles y portugueses. La densidad de afiliación de las organizaciones sindicales en ambos países ha sido tradicionalmente baja (Schnabel 2012). De ahí que la participación en el diálogo social haya sido percibida como una vía para compensar las deficiencias de afiliación con una mayor imbricación institucional.…”

A Sequential Decomposition of the Drop in Collective Bargaining Coverage

“…Union representation has been in strong decline in most OECD countries (Visser, 2006;Lesch, 2004;OECD, 2004;Card et al, 2003;Schnabel, 2013). It is interesting to see that the same trend affects countries with very different institutional set-ups such as the USA, Canada, the UK, and Germany.…”