Moderators of the productivity impact of unionism in South Korea

The relationship between unions and productivity in South Korea was examined. Starting from pointing out the conceptual limitations of the current paradigm for the union--productivity research and resultant contradictory empirical findings, the focus of the investigation was to empirically assess the role of various moderators in determining the direction and extent of the union impact on labor productivity. Two groups of potential moderators of the union productivity impact--macro and micro--were developed, and separate analyses were conducted by utilizing two independent data set--archival and survey. At the macro-level, it was found, among other things, that the union impact on productivity was stochastically distributed across industries with a mean of zero and a variance of.15. At the micro-level, it was found that firm size, union relationship with management, union achievement, and gainsharing program had some impact upon productivity, although the estimated magnitudes of the impact of individual constructs were not invariant across models employed for the estimation procedures