2 - Joining and Leaving Unions

Summary

This chapter analyses union membership at the level of the individual employee. The data come from four surveys of employee attitudes: the 1990–91 Survey of Employees in Metropolitan Sydney Establishments (SEMSE), undertaken by the author; the 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS95); the 1996 Labor Council Survey (LCS-96); and the 1996 Australian Election Survey (AES) (Jones et al. 1996). These surveys are discussed in more detail in the appendix on research methodology. The first two surveys were restricted to employees in workplaces with 20 or more employees, with SEMSE also being restricted to certain industries and localities; the other two were household surveys with no restrictions on type of workplace or locality. In 1997 a second Labor Council Survey (LCS-97) was, like the first, undertaken by Newspoll; it had far fewer questions but some results are briefly discussed in this and other chapters.

This chapter looks at the reasons people have for belonging or not belonging to a union. The focus is initially on answers to some openended questions posed by the surveys, followed by a discussion of union propensity (whether employees prefer to be in a union); the instrumentality of union membership; satisfaction with unions; responsiveness of unions; and aspects of the management-employee relationship.

Union Membership in the Surveys

Before discussing attitudinal data from the employee surveys, we need to know something about union membership in each of the surveys.