Membership Participation in Workplace Unionism: The Possibility of Union Renewal

This article reports membership involvement (participation and commitment) in five case studies. Membership participation in and commitment to workplace unionism is greater than is customarily portrayed and, additionally, there are fluctuations in both. However, the solidarity dimension of commitment is more important in discussing participation than that of ideology since active members can have either an instrumental or an ideological orientation to unionism. Surges of involvement in a workplace are experienced in response to the impact of events in the local union environment, as mediated particularly by local leadership style. The possibility for union renewal comes through building up the base level of participation by careful local leadership so that members can more easily be encouraged to take part in collective activities in times of necessity.     

Trade Unions and Political Participation in the European Union: Still Providing a Democratic Dividend?

Decline in electoral participation is a feature of many Western democracies. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between trade union membership and political participation. Workplace authority structures, trade union membership and union presence have been identified as important influences on electoral participation. Based on a survey of employees in 15 member states of the European Union, we test for a relationship between political participation, union membership and union workplace presence. The independent effect of trade union membership on political participation was found to be both significant and positive and is associated with higher levels of political activism and electoral participation. Furthermore, an institutional context that facilitates high levels of union density seems likely to have an overall positive effect on citizen participation.     

The Union Makes Us Strong? A Study of the Dynamics of Workplace Union Leadership at Two UK Manufacturing Plants

This paper draws on qualitative case study evidence to investigate the way in which union leaders involved in two workplace organizations deal with the process of managing their role within the employment relationship. In particular, the influence of their leadership style on the commitment and participation of rank-and-file members is considered. The paper highlights the dialectical relationship between local leaders and members in terms of trade union democracy and local leadership style.     

The Influence of Leadership and Member Attitudes in Understanding the Nature of Union Participation

There has been a growth of interest among industrial relations scholars in the functions of union leadership at both national and local levels. This paper presents a survey-based analysis of the impact of union leaders on member participation in Cypriot public-sector trade unions. It indicates that active leaders promote participation both directly and indirectly, through their influence on members' attitudes towards the union. The study emphasizes the importance of leadership in facilitating further understanding of member participation in trade unions.     

Justice and Union Participation: An Extension and Test of Mobilization Theory

Heeding John Kelly's call to reorient the field of industrial relations towards the study of injustice, we employ mobilization, social exchange and organizational justice theories to specify and test a model of union participation. Using individual‐level survey data from public‐sector union members to test our model, we find that differences in worker perceptions of workplace injustice and union justice explain slightly more variation in members’ union participation than more traditional measures of job satisfaction and union instrumentality perceptions. The implications of our analysis for researchers and union practitioners are also discussed.     

Trade Union Presence and Employer-Provided Training in Great Britain

Using linked employer-employee data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, we find a positive correlation between workplace union recognition and private-sector employer-provided training. We explore the avenues through which union recognition might affect training by interacting recognition with the closed shop, the level at which pay bargaining takes place, and multiunionism. For non-manual-labor men and women, only union recognition matters. The various types of collective-bargaining institutions have no separate effect. However, the male manual training probability is significantly increased by union presence only through multiple unionism with joint negotiation. In contrast, for women manual workers, union recognition at the workplace has no effect on the training probability.     

Determinants of Union Recognition and Employee Involvement: Evidence from London Docklands

This article examines the determinants of union recognition and of employee involvement structures in London Dockland's workplaces, by means of multivariate analysis. The authors found that the respective dependent variables are significantly associated both with each other and with certain enterprise and establishment-level characteristics. Significant independent variables include workplace size, ownership status, the presence of a personnel manager and the incidence of skill shortages.     

A Segmented Model of Union Participation

This article presents and explores a model of union participation using union orientation as a segmenting criterion. Union orientation is shown to have a strong relationship with participation rates. The relationship between union segmentation, social networks, and political socialization is explored. The implications of this approach for union policy are explored.     

An Analysis of Workplace Representatives, Union Power and Democracy in Australia

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the views and experiences of workplace representatives in Australia in the context of falling union density, and to analyse factors that are most strongly associated with subjective union power at the workplace level, as perceived by delegates. The analysis relies on a large random survey of workplace delegates in eight significant Australian unions. The article describes the situation broadly facing delegates as shown by the survey and analyses a set of factors associated with the power of workers as perceived by delegates. We find that higher levels of reported activism among delegates are strongly associated with greater subjective union power. We also find that self-reported delegate confidence is also strongly associated with perceptions of higher union power, as is delegate's clarity about their roles. The data also show a strong association between perceptions of democracy within the union and union power. Support for delegates from the union office and organizers is also associated with higher levels of union power at the local level. The analysis provides some support for union renewal strategies associated with the 'organizing model' as applied in Australia and some other Anglo-Saxon countries that aim to increase the activism of workplace delegates through education, the provision of support for workplace delegates and more democratic union structures.     

Renewing Union Narrative Resources: How Union Capabilities Make a Difference

This article explores the role of framing in mobilizing and transforming narrative resources. It draws on in‐depth studies of two different workplace unions within the same multinational company in Canada. We conducted interviews with managers and trade unionists at different levels over a number of years of observation. Each of these workplace unions mobilizes new repertoires of action to enhance its capacity to act. Yet they differ considerably in their capacity to renew their narrative resources. Whereas one of the workplace unions still relies on an exclusive and restrictive narrative, the other union has evolved towards a more encompassing and inclusive narrative. This article argues that strategic capabilities are a key variable in understanding the processes through which narrative resources change and are mobilized.     

Social Media in Union Communications: An International Study with UNI Global Union Affiliates

This article assesses the use of social media in union communications based on an international survey with 149 unions affiliated with UNI Global Union. High expectations of union modernization, leadership and pressures from members are likely to drive the agenda of social media within unions. However, the actual use of different channels is based on organizational variables such as membership base and participation in communities of practice. Beliefs about the anticipated benefits and risks of social media were not found to be influential in these early assessments. Implications for union communication strategies are discussed.     

Union Participation, Job Satisfaction, and Employee Turnover: An Event-History Analysis of the Exit-Voice Hypothesis

This study examines the exit-voice hypothesis by applying event-history analysis to data from a sample of 674 unionized public school teachers from 405 schools. Union participation (i.e., voice) and job satisfaction had significant negative main effects on turnover. In contrast to the original formulation of the exit-voice hypothesis, a test for interaction revealed that union participation had significant negative effects on quit behavior for members displaying both low and high satisfaction.
  The existing conclusions regarding the role of unions in reducing employee quits by providing voice mechanisms implicitly assume that union members actually use these mechanisms. Mechanisms such as attending union meetings and serving on a committee provide opportunities for members to express how they feel about their wages and working conditions. In this article we examine the influences of union participation and job satisfaction on individuals' decisions to quit working for an organization using event-history analysis. Unlike existing research, the present study focuses on member participation in a range of union activities (i.e., voting in union elections, attending union meetings, serving in a union office or on a committee, and seeking assistance from the union) to analyze the effect of union voice on employee quits. ¹ We further investigate how union participation and job satisfaction may interact to influence employee turnover over time, controlling for demographic, job-related, environmental, and contextual variables across 405 research sites.     

Workplace Flexibilities,Job Satisfaction and Union Membership in the US Workforce

Using individual‐level data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, we quantify how workers' job satisfaction levels correlate with five schedule‐based workplace flexibilities. The data permit us to control for numerous variables that might otherwise explain variation in the probability of job satisfaction, including, but not limited to, income, benefits, stress, depression, job control and individual preferences over flexibilities. Conditional on this control set, we find that workplace flexibilities correlate with an 8.1 per cent increase in job satisfaction. The relationship between job satisfaction and workplace flexibilities prevails through several sensitivity analyses, bias assessments and a propensity score matching analysis. We also explore how job satisfaction, union membership and workplace flexibilities intermix; we find that workplace flexibilities may function as a partial substitute for union membership.     

Ten Years of New Labour: Workplace Learning,Social Partnership and Union Revitalization in Britain

The establishment of a role in workplace learning has been perceived as one of the achievements of trade unions under New Labour. This article analyses the part the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has played in public policy since 1997. It examines its attempts to influence government and develop social partnership and statutory backing for vocational training. It assesses its degree of success and considers whether the TUC's role is best characterized in terms of social partnership or as a rediscovery of the unions' public administration function. It reviews the literature which suggests that involvement in learning stimulates union revitalization. The article concludes that the TUC has failed to attain significant influence over public policy. Rather it has delivered policy determined by government with priority accorded to employer predilections. A public administration role focused on the Union Learning Fund has provided the TUC with a new, secondary function, which provides some compensation for the failure of its primary agenda. Nonetheless, on the evidence, involvement in workplace learning appears an implausible path to union revitalization.     

Union Commitment and Activism in Britain and the United States: Searching for Synthesis and Synergy for Renewal

We propose a fuller synthesis between two relatively disjointed literatures to create synergy. Union commitment research has a long tradition and a relatively rigorous orientation grounded in industrial psychology. Recently, it has been eclipsed by emerging research on union renewal, and specifically that on union organizing. Renewal research has largely ignored union commitment research even though union renewal literature stresses the importance of activism, and this concept is strongly linked to commitment. A critical synthesis of these literatures yields progress in terms of addressing key qualitative and quantitative aspects of the contemporary crisis of labour unionism. A tentative framework is constructed that stipulates the main components and variables, and offers guidance for future research.     

Service innovation and adoption in industrial markets: An SME perspective

Service innovation is essential, particularly for companies operating in highly competitive environments, as it can lead to innovation adoption behaviors, which in turn influence overall business performance. Drawing upon the innovation adoption and relationship marketing literature, and grounded within the structure-conduct-performance paradigm and social exchange theory, this study examines the reputational and relational mechanisms through which service innovation influences the innovation adoption decisions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A survey of 336 Australian SME representatives reveals the critical role of suppliers’ sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) and affective commitment in mediating the relationship between service innovation and innovation adoption behavior. However, industry-relevant moderators in the form of technological turbulence and long-term orientation constrain the mediating effects. Specifically, perceived SCA has stronger mediating effects among short-term-oriented customers, whereas affective commitment has stronger mediating effects when technological turbulence is low. The findings provide useful insights for organizations in terms of capitalizing on their reputation and relationship with customers to encourage the adoption of innovation by SMEs.     

Accounting for Greenfield Union Organizing Outcomes

This paper presents a framework for evaluating and accounting for the outcomes of ‘greenfield’ union organizing campaigns. It argues that previous studies have tended to focus too much on the establishment of collective bargaining and negotiation of first contract as a campaign outcome. Instead, the effectiveness and representativeness of new union structures are emphasized, and the sustainability of those structures is emphasized as the most important outcome. A key finding from the empirical data is that campaigns that build both workplace activism and are co‐ordinated by officers create more sustainable outcomes than campaigns that focus on one or the other. The evidence shows how and why these outcomes emerge, and the paper concludes with a consideration of the theoretical and practical implications.     

Shaping Union and Gender Identities: A Case Study of Women-Only Trade Union Courses

In the context of efforts to revitalize unions and the acknowledged need to widen participation within trade unions, this paper argues that women‐only trade union education acts as a vehicle for increasing women's participation and for improving their experiences of unions. Drawing on a qualitative research study of women‐only courses in two large male‐dominated British trade unions, the findings indicate that such courses provide the conditions for women to question, reinforce or transform their social identities and thereby can lead to greater union identification and participation.     

The Viability of Trade Union Organization: A Bargaining Unit Analysis

The paper develops a model of trade union behaviour based on the concept of the viable bargaining unit. Viability rests on five conditions: membership level, service level, membership participation, employer recognition, and facilities. Unions are seen as portfolios of viable and inviable bargaining units. Six propositions are derived, concerning union scale, growth, the impact of statutory recognition provisions, the emergence of conglomerate unions, governance structures, and relations with employers. Employer dependence is central, and a simple game‐theoretic approach is used to discuss employer co‐operation. Viability at the union level is achieved by portfolio diversification and employer co‐operation.     

Academic Workers and Union Membership: An Inevitable Dilution of Solidarity?

The growth of service employment and new forms of work has supposedly fostered the diffusion of individual orientations at the expense of traditional forms of union solidarity. These developments suggest that academics are likely to manifest an individualist orientation and a weak attachment to trade union membership. Based on a survey of unionized employees in a university setting, we examine whether there are differences in union attachment and solidarity between professionals and other occupational groups.