Union members are often found to be less satisfied with their jobs than their non‐union counterparts, and this apparent paradox has a number of possible explanations. The first is that unions make workers dissatisfied with their working conditions in order to encourage them to press for improvements. Because they tend to be successful, union members tend to be paid more and enjoy more secure roles, so they quit less, but retain some unhappiness with their roles and conditions – and this leads to a larger stock of dissatisfied workers.
It’s also been suggested that union membership and job satisfaction are both influenced by working conditions, so that what’s causing dissatisfaction is not union membership, but the conditions. Alternatively, workers who are more likely to be dissatisfied with their work may be more likely to become union members. The answer matters, because job satisfaction is important to workers and desirable for employers. Managing employees’ satisfaction levels is a global industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Longitudinal data and a change in working conditions
Our research used British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society data to test the theory that union membership causes dissatisfaction by examining changes in job satisfaction around the time of a significant change in working conditions – 2011’s alterations to UK workers’ pension arrangements. These would involve increased pension contributions for most workers, and led to a major industrial dispute involving unions representing 2.1 million workers.
We asked whether the pension announcement saw a fall in job satisfaction among those affected, and if so, was that fall greater for union members?
Findings
By tracking job satisfaction for affected workers compared to those unaffected, we were able to show that unionised and non‐unionised workers both experienced a decline in job satisfaction at the time of the dispute.
We then investigated whether the fall in job satisfaction might have caused not by the changes themselves, but by the trade union campaign on the issue. We did this by comparing affected union members and affected non‐members, and the results indicated that union members weren’t disproportionately affected by the pensions dispute.
We had taken into account factors such as workers’ personalities and values, demographic characteristics like gender and age, social status, and terms and conditions of employment – including income. The findings suggested no causal relationship between union membership and job satisfaction.
A closer look
However, these results needed further investigation, because they assume that a person’s place in the groups being studied – union members and non-members – is random. The decision to join a union, though, is influenced by each worker’s values and personality, and by social norms that cause workers to prefer public sector jobs and/or union membership. We had taken these variables into account, but also carried out further tests to make sure their results were robust.
Using a different analysis technique, we compared workers who were affected by the dispute, but not by the pension changes, because they had reached normal retirement age before the increase in pensions contributions in April 2015. If union campaigns affect job satisfaction, the satisfaction of those due to retire before the pensions changes took effect should be affected in a similar way to those retiring slightly later whose incomes fell as a result of the increased pension contributions. In fact, job satisfaction was lower among those affected by the changes, suggesting it was the pensions change, not the union campaign that caused job satisfaction to be lower.
Our conclusions
To understand the issue better, further research is needed into job satisfaction in the public and private sectors, in countries outside the UK, and into whether workers engage with union campaigns and how effective they believe their union is. Future studies also need to examine working conditions which unions can’t influence.
Overall, though, our research supports the idea that union membership does not have a causal effect on job satisfaction. Union members’ job dissatisfaction is the result of cumulative changes to their working conditions in workplaces and sectors that employ larger numbers of union members.
Read the original paper by Ioulia Bessa, Andy Charlwood and Danat Valizade, Do Unions Cause Job Dissatisfaction? Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment in the United Kingdom
This blog was originally published as an article in our Insights 2021 report. There will be another Insights this month, and a week of online events showcasing policy-relevant research from the last year
Authors
Ioulia Bessa
Ioulia Bessa is Associate Professor at Leeds University Business School
Andy Charlwood
Professor Andy Charlwood is Chair in Human Resources Management at Leeds University Business School
Danat Valizade
Dr Danat Valizade is Associate Professor in Quantitative Methods at Leeds University Business School
