Class Organization and Subjective Well-Being: A Cross-National Analysis

I examine labor organization as a determinant of cross-national variation in life satisfaction across the industrial democracies. The evidence strongly suggests not only that unions increase the satisfaction of their own members, but, critically, that the extent to which workers are organized positively contributes to the satisfaction of citizens in general, non-members included. These hypotheses are confirmed using both aggregate-level pooled time serial and individual-level cross-sectional data across a number of countries. These relationships are shown to have an impact that is independent and separable from other economic, political and cultural factors. The implications for the study of subjective well-being per se and of labor organization as a more general social phenomenon within class societies are discussed. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of an extensive social scientific literature on the socio-political determinants of life satisfaction. With the refinement of the tools necessary to measure with reasonable reliability and validity how satisfied people are with their lives, it has become possible to test theoretically derived hypotheses about the