The Demise of Collective Organization in Europe: The Decline in Union Membership and its Consequences

Trade unions provide a major contribution to social cohesion and economic integration in European societies. The decline in union membership that can be observed in many European countries in recent years poses a major challenge to these societies. A decline in union membership limits the resources, mobilization and legitimacy of the collective organization of labour interests in post-industrial societies. As trade unions provide public goods that cannot by and large be withheld from non-members, union face as collective membership organization a severe problem of collective action. There are many individual factors that increase or lower the propensity to become a union member such as social networks and peer pressure, norms and attitudes, bureaucratic working conditions, etc. In addition the overall causes of union decline are multiple, ranging from adverse economic, political and socio-demographic changes. However, there are also cross-national institutional differences that facilitate union access to workplace and provide selective incentives to organize such as legal provisions and union-run unemployment insurance. The project aims at analyzing the cross-national differences in union density in Europe and other advanced economies, both with a view to the causes of membership decline and the consequences for the place of unions in the economy and society, and their importance for social cohesion. One major innovation compared to previous projects is the systematic use of survey data (ISSP, ESS, national surveys) and the comparison with administrative and institutional data. Another ambition of the project is to integrate much better than hitherto the knowledge and statistics on unions in Central and Eastern Europe in the comparative analysis of trade unions, industrial relations and institutions of socio-economic governance. Based on the contributions for a workshop in Amsterdam in Spring 2009, it is planned to publish a selection of papers as a special issue in an English-language industrial relations journal.