Union Competition and Strikes: The Need for Analysis at the Sector Level

International comparative research has found that strike incidence is higher where two or more unions bargain with an employer ("multi-unionism"), as is common in most European countries, than where only one union does, all else equal. Two proposed explanations for this relationship, both invoking inter-union rivalry as the main dynamic, are that under multi-unionism, unions (a) make propagandistic use of strikes to attract members, or (b) compete with each other by bidding up bargaining demands. To date, the evidence bearing on these hypotheses has been equivocal because, the author argues, researchers have focused on activity at the national level rather than at the lower levels that are more commonly the nexus for strike formation. The author performs empirical tests using industry-sector-level data for seven European countries for the years 1990-2006, and finds evidence clearly favoring the competitive bargaining hypothesis over the propaganda hypothesis.

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 The Impact of Unions on Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, and Turnover

"Union membership is not a free good, however. It carries both economic and social costs. The most obvious economic costs to the individual worker are union dues and potential loss of income due to strikes. In addition, job security, supposedly a benefit of union status, is not a certainty for all members. The monopolistic model of unions shows that they lower the demand for union labor by raising wage rates above competitive levels, which results in a shift of jobs to the nonunion labor force (Farber, 1986; Hirsch and Addison, 1986; Addison and Chilton, 1997). This increases the probability that low-seniority union workers may lose their jobs the more unions are achieving success in increasing the wage premium (Kleiner, 2002; Thieblot, 2002).1 The social costs of union status can include a more adversarial relationship with the employer, a more rigid or bureaucratic organization of work, and more narrowly defined job tasks with less individual discretion."

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Strikes, Employee Workplace Representation, Unionism, and Trust

 Strikes, Employee Workplace Representation, Unionism, and Trust: Evidence from Cross-Country Data

Abstract

This paper investigates the determinants of industrial conflict in companies, using a multicountry workplace inquiry for 2009 and 2013 and various measures of strike activity. The principal goal is to address the effect of formal workplace representation on strikes, distinguishing in the first instance between works councils on the one hand and broadly equivalent trade union based entities on the other. The role of unionism is also central to this inquiry, not only with respect to the degree to which workplace representation is union dominated but also and more familiarly perhaps through workplace union density and the level at which collective bargaining is conducted. Attention is also paid to the quality of industrial relations, as reflected in dissonance, namely divergent assessments of managers and employee workplace representatives as to the state of industrial relations. Although country effects do matter, it is reported that works councils are associated with reduced strike activity. However, any such effect is sensitive in particular to the union status of work councilors and time. There is also some indication that collective bargaining at levels higher than the company can exacerbate strike activity but this effect does not persist, possibly because of decentralization and the development of hybrid bargaining structures. For its part, good industrial relations appears key to strike reduction, independent of workplace representation.

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