EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Anticipation, Free-Rider Problems, and Adaptation to Trade Unions: Re-Examining the Curious Case of Dissatisfied Union Members

Nattavudh Powdthavee

ILR Review, 2011, vol. 64, issue 5, 1000-1019

Abstract: The author studies the past, contemporaneous, and future effects of union membership on job satisfaction. Using eleven waves (5–15) of the British Household Panel Survey, he documents evidence rejecting the paradox of dissatisfied union members. By separating union “free-riders†from union-covered non-members in fixed-effects equations, he finds significant anticipation effects to unionism for both prospective and covered non-members of both genders. Workers go on to report, on average, a significant net increase in their overall job satisfaction in the year unionization occurs, although this decreases with time. Moreover, adaptation to unionism is complete within the first few years of unionization. One explanation for this is that workers adapt their reported satisfaction over time to support their union bargaining efforts, which would be consistent with at least one explanation given for a union's role in fanning the flames of discontent with management during contract negotiations. That is, members may not actually be as dissatisfied with their jobs as it appears.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001979391106400508 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Anticipation, Free-Rider Problem, and Adaptation to Trade Union: Re-examining the Curious Case of Dissatisfied Union Members (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Anticipation, Free Rider Problem, and Adaptation to Trade Union: Re-examining the Curious Case of Dissatisfied Union Members (2009) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:64:y:2011:i:5:p:1000-1019

DOI: 10.1177/001979391106400508

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:64:y:2011:i:5:p:1000-1019