This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (¿nevermembers¿) 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...

This paper explains why some employees who favor unionization fail to join, and why others who wish to abandon union membership continue paying dues. Our explanation is based on a model where employees incur switching (search) costs when attempting to abandon (acquire) union membership....

The links between unionisation and job satisfaction remain controversial. In keeping with the existing literature we find strong statistically significant negative correlations between unionisation and overall job satisfaction. However, in contrast to the previous literature we find that once...

Union membership and density in Britain has experienced substantial decline since 1979. The fall in private sector membership and density has been much greater than in the public sector. The size of the union sector, measured by employer recognition, has shrunk. Membership decline has been...

The paper uses two data sources to map trends in resource availability for trade unions in Britain. Union resources exist on the one hand in the form of subscription income and accumulated assets shown in union accounts and, on the other, establishment level resources provided by employers and...

The legal obligation on employers to provide information to employees has grown since the early 1970s. At that time, the emphasis was on disclosure for collective bargaining. In the 1980s and 1990s, the emphasis shifted more to disclosure for joint consultation. In the context of new...

Under the auspices of the debate about high performance work systems, it has been suggested that the evidence of positive results is disappointing and that one reason is that there has been a lack of theory. This paper argues that there is indeed a great deal of theory that could be used to...

To what extent can the decline in British trade union density between 1990 and 1998 be attributed to declining opportunities to unionize compared to declining propensity to unionize among workers with the opportunity to do so and to compositional change? This question is answered using data to...

Overall, collective bargaining coverage has dropped by around fourteen percentage points. This paper investigates the causes and consequences of the decline in collective bargaining in Britain between 1990 and 1998. One in three workplaces that practiced collective bargaining in 1990 had...

In 2000 the UK government introduced, under the Employment Relations Act of 1999, a new statutory union recognition procedure, while in 2003 it published a consultation document on its Review of the Act. The document concluded that th eunion procedure was broadly working and confirmed that the...