The effects of corporate strategy and workplace innovations on union representation

This paper explores the decline of union membership within partially organized firms. Using data from two Conference Board surveys of labor relations practices (1977 and 1983), the authors test a series of propositions concerning the effects of corporate industrial relations values and strategies and workplace innovations on union representation and membership. The results show that whereas the average firm reduced the number of workers represented by unions by approximately 977 from 1977 to 1983, firms that placed a high priority on union avoidance reduced union representation by an average of 2,647 workers over the same period. Moreover, the typical firm that emphasized union avoidance reduced the probability that its new facilities would be organized from approximately 15 percent to less than 1 percent. is now well established that the pro-portion of the work force unionized has declined precipitously over the past three decades from a peak of around 35 percent in the mid 1950s to less than 20 percent in 1984. ' Some of this decline, perhaps as much as 40 percent, is accounted for by changes in the industrial, regional, and occupational distribution of the labor force *Thonias Kochan and Robert McKersie are Pro-fessors of ' Industrial Relations and John Chalykoff is a doctoral candidate, all at the Sloan School of ' Man-agement, MIT. 'The lack of comparable data on union membership and definitional differences in both the numerators and denominators of ' unionization estimates make it difficult o provide precise statements about the spe-cific year in which union coverage was highest and how that number compares to current estimates. See Dickens and Leonard (1985) for a discussion of mem-bership data from the 1950s, Freeman and Medoff (1979) for estimates from the 1960s and the 1970s, and Adams (1985) for Bureau of ' Labor Statistics esti-mates for the 1980s. (Farber 1985; Freeman 1985; Dickens an