TRADE UNIONS IN THE BALANCE

 Decline of jobs or unions?

How much of union decline is caused by the disappearance of highly unionized jobs in industry (mining, manufacturing, utilities and construction) and how much is the result of fewer workers joining the unions? To answer that question, we must take a counterfactual approach and estimate the number of union members manufacturing and mining would have had in 2016 if union density rates had stayed the same since 1980. Table 2 shows this for 18 of the advanced industrial OECD member countries for which we have the necessary longitudinal membership and employment data. Over a period of nearly four decades, the unions in these countries, taken together, lost 20 million members in industry (column 2, last row), of which one third (6.7 million, 33 per cent) due to disappearing jobs (column 3) and two-thirds (13.3 million, 67 per cent) due to fewer members (in the jobs that remained) (column 4), for instance because fewer young workers in industrial jobs join the unions

As can be seen from the table, the proportions differ across countries. For instance, in Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Sweden, unions lost most members because of disappearing jobs in industry. The opposite is true for most other countries. In Australia and Canada, unions declined in industry despite job growth. In the United States, union decline is hardly the result of fewer jobs in industry, but rather the result of the de-unionization of industry. Restructuring within manufacturing (from heavy to light industry, for instance) and the relocation of factories to Southern states with ‘right-to-work’ legislation, which prohibits employers from collecting union dues for workers under collective agreements, appear to have played a bigger role than the decline of manufacturing jobs. 

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