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- Title
Socioeconomic Differences in Worker Involvement in Labor Union Activities.
- Authors
McEachern, Peter J.; Budnick, Christopher J.
- Abstract
The success of organized labor is aided by worker involvement in voluntary, union-related activities such as leadership roles and the socialization of new members. Established models of the attitudinal antecedents of this involvement (e.g., the exchange-covenant model; Snape & Redman, 2004) hold that positive attitudes toward unions in general are involvement's primary predictor, with effectiveness of one's own union being of secondary importance. However, these findings are gathered largely from high-socioeconomic status (SES) samples (e.g., university professors; see, e.g., Fiorito et al., 2014), and even more diversely sampled studies do not test for the influence of SES. Therefore, using a socioeconomically and occupationally diverse sample (n = 94), we examined whether established union involvement models apply equally to low- and high-SES union members. We found that, in high-SES individuals, general attitudes about unions positively predicted self-reports of past involvement, b = 0.70, t(79) = 2.57, p = .01, CI95%[.16, 2.15], and future involvement interest, b = 0.77, t(79) = 2.45, p = .02, CI95%[.15, 1.40]; results were null for average- (past involvement p = .81, future p = .83) and low-SES workers (past involvement p = .10, future p = .24). Our findings indeed suggest that the exchange-covenant model is only applicable to high-SES union workers. General union attitudes are ostensibly irrelevant to overall involvement from their low-SES counterparts, possibly due to greater influence of social and material resource exchange on low-SES union members considering becoming involved in union activities. Future union involvement research should account for the influence of socioeconomic factors.
- Subjects
LABOR unions; ATTITUDE (Psychology); SOCIAL influence; PLANNED behavior theory; SOCIOECONOMIC factors
- Publication
Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 2020, Vol 25, p278
- ISSN
2164-8204
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.24839/2325-7342.JN25.3.278