Who Joins Trade Unions? Testing New Sociological Explanations

Trade unions and development

Trade Unions in Germany

A new channel for health promotion: building trade unions.

PURPOSE Labor unions are a largely unevaluated channel for health promotion interventions for working class populations, who are at increased risk for smoking and poor diet. We conducted qualitative and quantitative research to understand the meaning and function of union membership in workers' lives and applied this information to health promotion intervention design. METHODS Cross-sectional...

How Trade Unions Increase Welfare

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which firms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully info...

Trade unions’ objectives and inflation

Important results recently achieved in games between trade unions and central banks rest on the assumption that workers’ organisations are interested, besides real wages and employment, in inflation per se. This hypothesis is crucial because: (i) the results are not robust to its removal; (ii) the justifications provided to support it are not without problems. The paper raises the issue, critic...