Workers of the Less Developed World Unite? A Multilevel Analysis of Unionization in Less Developed Countries

Abstract

Past scholars of unionization have offered exemplary cross-national studies of affluent democracies and case studies of less developed countries (LDCs). What has been lacking is cross-national research on unionization across LDCs. We conduct a multilevel analysis of the likelihood that a worker is unionized with the late-1990s World Values surveys of 39 LDCs. We propose that unionization in LDCs can be explained by the individual characteristics of workers as well as the country-level factors of institutions, industrialization, and globalization. Our analyses yield several conclusions. First, owing to the legacy of state socialism, ex-communist countries have much higher unionization. Second, our analyses show that class very effectively explains union membership across LDCs. Although skilled manual workers are more unionized than most, educated professionals stand out for their distinctively high unionization. Third, the debt crisis significantly undermined unionization through the institutional influence of International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreements and the globalization pressure of debt service. Despite being the focus of much research, industrialization, democratization, the size of the state, International Labour Organization conventions, and international trade and investment are surprisingly insignificant. Decomposing the sample by communist legacy, signing an IMF agreement is significant in ex-communist countries, and debt service is significant in countries without a communist legacy. Overall, we conclude that the debt crisis has undermined unionization and class remains a powerful basis of mobilization across LDCs.

Two Multilevel Modeling Techniques for Analyzing Comparative Longitudinal Survey Datasets

“…Such models are useful for analyzing observations that are grouped or clustered. 2 Recent applications to comparative survey data have examined and sought to identify the covariates of outcomes like voting (Gelman et al 2008), political attitudes (Jamal and Nooruddin 2010), union membership (Martin and Brady 2007), religiosity (Karakoc¸and Bas -kan 2012), health (Jen, Jones and Johnston 2009), poverty (Brady, Fullerton and Cross 2009) and gender gaps in household labor (Iversen and Rosenbluth 2006). This diversity of applications demonstrates the broad appeal of the method.…”

Labor Unions and Good Governance: A Cross-National, Comparative Analysis

“…13 See Martin and Brady (2007) in this volume for further explanation on relatively high union membership in ex-communist countries.…”

Conditionality: Forms, Function, and History

“…However, some find that compliance with conditionality enhances economic performance (Noorbakhsh & Paloni 2001). Vreeland (2002Vreeland ( , 2003b also finds that IMF programs foster economic inequality by redistributing income away from labor and toward capital, and, consistent with this, Martin & Brady (2007) find that IMF agreements reduce unionization among excommunist developing countries.…”