Men, Women and Unions

Haile, Getinet

Abstract

The paper examines whether workplace gender dynamics contributed to the decline of unions. To this end, it reviews relevant literature and proposes three hypotheses, which it then tests using alternative empirical analyses and data from WERS and BSAS. The results from employee-level analysis reveal that, compared with women: (i) men were significantly less likely to have never been union members and (ii) they were also significantly more likely to have been union members in the past. In addition, workplace-level analysis using WERS reveals that there is an inverse link between union membership and the share of women in workplaces, which is also found to have a nonlinear form. The paper ponders if unions may need to encompass broader agenda than those informed by the median voter to improve their fate.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 22, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Mar 29, 2021
• Publication Date: May 16, 2021
• Deposit Date: Mar 8, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 30, 2023
• Journal: Industrial Relations Journal
• Print ISSN: 0019-8692
• Electronic ISSN: 1468-2338
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 201-217
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12324
• Keywords: Union decline; Gender composition; employer-employee data; Britain JEL classification: J51; J16; J82
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5380605
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irj.12324