Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidizethe price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a newsurvey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerablevariation in joining among...

This paper examines demand for union membership amongst young workers in Britain, Canada and the United States. The paper benchmarks youth demands for collective representation against those of adult workers and finds that a large and significant representation gap exists in all three countries....

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (‘never-members’) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall...

We investigate the effect of employer job security guarantees on employee perceptions of job security. Using linked employer-employee data from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey, we find job security guarantees reduce employee perceptions of job insecurity. This finding is...

A national survey makes it possible to examine employees’ awareness of net overall reductions in the size of the workforce along with their awareness of employer policies that promise ‘no compulsory redundancies’. Differences are investigated between union and nonunion workplaces, and...

This paper presents evidence of both counter-cyclical and secular decline in the union membership wage premiu m in the US and the UK over the last couple of decades. The premium has fallen for most groups of workers, the main exception being public sector workers in the US. By the beginning of...

Union membership has declined precipitously in a number of countries, including in the United States, over the past fifty years. Can anything be done to stem this decline? This article argues that union voice is a positive attribute (among others) of union membership that is experiential in...

The percentage of workers who choose not to join the union available to them at their workplace has been rising in Britain and New Zealand. Social custom, union instrumentality, the fixed costs of joining, employee perceptions of management attitudes to unionization and employee problems at work...