The 'North-South' Divide in Trade Union Recognition in Britain: Still Holding Up?

Historically, union organisation in Britain has been disproportionately concentrated in the northern area of the country. In this paper, we investigate whether this relationship has been maintained during the 1980s when the overall level of union membership declined substantially. The data base for the study is provided by the national Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990, with a common logit regression equation being estimated for manual and nonmanual workers separately for all three years. The results obtained indicate that the North-South divide tended to weaken for manual employees in the latter part of the 1980s, whereas it increased steadily for nonmanuals throughout the 1980s. Indeed the North-South divide in trade union recognition is currently more of a nonmanual than manual employee phenomenon in Britain. Copyright 1995 by Scottish Economic Society.