Why We Need a Survey of Unions

Abstract

Unions represent millions of workers in both Britain and the U.S. despite substantial membership declines over the last thirty years. Union influence and trends contained therein are major concerns to a broad range of social sciences and business-related disciplines, as well as to unions themselves. Data on unions as organizations are, however, woefully inadequate for the purpose of assessing the activities and influence of unions, as well as their status and prospects. In this article, we assess what we know and do not know about unions as organizations, and offer suggestions for what we need to know and how to get from where we are presently to where we would like to be.

Practice What You Preach: The Gender Pay Gap in Labor Union Compensation

“…Any systematic collection of this information, such that it could be matched to compensation data, would be a worthy contribution to the literature. Unfortunately, however, unions are reticent to participate in research unless it provides value to them (Fiorito and Gall 2012), which would make this a very difficult undertaking.…”

“…Postal Service or the federal government is required by law to file an annual report (OLMS 2016a). Due to this legal mandate, the data offer a rare glimpse into the remuneration of leaders and staff in an entire sector since “virtually all” U.S. unions must file these annual reports (Fiorito and Gall 2012: 221).…”

“…Despite employing a number of response facilitation techniques, including designing the survey (both content and formatting) with care, establishing survey importance and relevance to the respondent in the cover letter, managing survey length, sending a reminder note, recognizing the sensitivity of the survey questions and assuring response anonymity, and enclosing postage‐paid reply envelopes (Greer, Chuchinprakarn, and Seshadri 2000; Rogelberg and Stanton 2007), our response rates were low – 12 percent for national unions ( n = 11) and 9 percent for local unions ( n = 121). The low response rates are not entirely surprising, given that research has shown that surveys of executives or top managers asking about organization‐level phenomena tend to produce low response rates (Baruch and Holton 2008; Cycyota and Harrison 2006); this might be particularly true of unions, which are known to be reluctant to cooperate in scholarly research (Fiorito and Gall 2012). Despite the limited response, though, the information we received provides us with a first glimpse into how unions set pay for their officers and staff.…”

It is not just about paying your dues: Impact of generational cohort on active and passive union participation

“…Theoretically, as active and passive participation require different levels of effort from the member (e.g., time and personal investment), they should have different antecedents and outcomes (Gall & Fiorito, 2012a;Kelloway & Barling, 1993). Practically speaking, such a measure will facilitate research to help better understand the relative importance of active participation (Fiorito & Gall, 2012;Hickey et al, 2010) and passive participation (Shore & Newton, 1995) on union renewal. Such research does, however, require the existence of a psychometrically sound measure of this construct to proceed.…”

‘Are you a union member?’ Determinants and trends of subjective union membership in Italian society (1972–2013)

“…Although ITANES is an indirect survey about union membership (it was not directly conceived to study this issue, see Fiorito and Gall, 2012), and is thus less comprehensive in terms of industrial and company-level variables, it presents two main advantages. First, it is the only database that allows us to examine 40 years of total union membership (including both employees and non-employees) in Italy.…”