Who Are the Workers Who Never Joined a Union? Empirical Evidence From Western and Eastern Germany**

Zusammenfassung

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Using representative data from the German social survey ALLBUS 2002 and the European Social Survey 2002/03, this paper provides the first empirical analysis of trade union "never-membership" in Germany. We show that between 54 and 59 percent of all employees in Germany have never been members of a trade union. In western Germany, individuals' probability of "never-membership" is significantly affected by their personal characteristics, their political orientation and (to a lesser degree) their family background. In addition, the presence of a union at the workplace plays a significant role. While the latter factor is also important in eastern Germany, many of the variables which are relevant for 'never-membership' in the west prove to be irrelevant in the east.

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Auszug

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Who Are the Workers Who Never Joined a Union? Empirical Evidence From Western and Eastern Germany**

1. Introduction

Trade unions in Germany find it more and more difficult to attract and to retain members. Union density, defined as the percentage of union members among all employees, fell from 32.7 percent in 1980 to 23.8 percent in 2002 in western Germany, and was as low as 20.4 percent in eastern Germany in 2002 (see Schnabel/Wagner 2005; Schnabel 2005). Although there still exist traditional union strongholds in the public and the manufacturing sectors, union recruitment efforts seem to have been unsuccessful in the growing private service sector, among white-collar workers, among young employees and among workers in atypical employment. In short: "German trade unions have remained strong in those areas where they have been traditionally strong, but are not gaining members in those areas where they have been traditionally weak." (Hassel 1999: 501).

While no serious attempt has been made in Germany to analyze the group of employees that have resisted union recruitment efforts, there is a fair amount of research on unionization and its development over time (for descriptive analyses see Fichter 1997 and Ebbinghaus 2003). Aggregate time-series analyses in the business cycle tradition have shown that economic variables such as wage and price inflation, employment growth and unemployment i...

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