Unions and Job Satisfaction

The dominant theoretical perspective on the effect of unions on job satisfaction suggests that unions reduce job satisfaction by making workers more critical toward the workplace and more willing to complain about problems. However, there are important reasons why unions might be expected to increase satisfaction: Unions reduce wage inequality, increase worker control over jobs, and increase worker commitment to the work and the workplace. Furthermore, the empirical work which found a negative relationship between unionization and satisfaction omitted important variables. Specifically, past work failed to control for the possibility that jobs with undesirable attributes are more likely to be unionized than desirable jobs. We show that when job attributes are controlled, unionization has a significant positive effect on satisfaction. This positive effect is most likely to occur when unions have been able to give workers control over their jobs and involve them in union activities.