Upholding Unions – How Colleagues Shape Union Membership?

Harald Dale-Olsen (), Henning Finseraas (), Kristine Nergaard () and Elin Svarstad ()
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Harald Dale-Olsen: Institute for Social Research, Oslo
Henning Finseraas: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Kristine Nergaard: Fafo
Elin Svarstad: Fafo

No 18139, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Social interactions between young and senior colleagues might have consequences for union membership uptake of young workers, thus influencing public policies on unions. We apply Norwegian administrative register data to test this claim about the influence of social interactions on unionization, while addressing threats of homophily bias, contextual, and network confounding. Leveraging exogenous spillover shocks by colleagues’ siblings’ unionization to colleagues’ unionization, we find causal evidence supporting the notion that social interactions with close colleagues are important for unionization, mainly driven by social costs and information sharing. Our results suggest that one standard deviation increase in the union density of close colleagues, causes the uptake of union membership for young workers to grow by 20-23 percent. Our analyses thus reveal one source of additional spillover impacts from the implementation of public policies supporting unions. Furthermore, our results have important implications for unions’ mobilization strategies.

Keywords: panel data; young workers; social interaction; unionization; IV-analyses (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J50 J51 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-net
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