Can unions redress the fall in working-class turnout?

Fewer people are voting today compared to just a generation ago, a disturbing trend that has appeared across all major English-speaking democracies. Union membership has witnessed a similar collapse and, strikingly, not only are these two declines similar in scale, the ordering of voter turnout is identical to the ranking of trade union density, with New Zealand coming in top, Ireland, Britain and Canada in the middle, in that order, and the United States ranking bottom.

We explored the nature of union membership status and voting using a representative sample of Canadian workers. What we found was that union membership is associated with a roughly 10-12 percentage point increase in the propensity to vote. Even after controlling for other factors that could conceivably affect voter participation, union status still had a significantly positive effect on voting of nearly 6-7 percentage points.

The first reason union members are more likely to vote than non-members is that unions increase wages for their members and higher incomes are a significant determinant of voting. It is a sad fact that the poor vote less than the rich. So when we control for wages, we can see that about half of the union gap is actually due to this positive union wage effect.

Second, what happens at work has long been noted as a driver of what happens to people outside of the workplace. No less an admirer of the capitalist system than Adam Smith decried the problems that mind-numbing tasks could exert over workers, writing in The Wealth of Nations that ‘when a person’s whole attention is bestowed on the seventeenth part of a pin or the eightieth part of a button, he becomes stupid.’

Something similar occurs with union representation at work, but in a positive way: if employees are exposed to the formalities of collective bargaining and union representation at work they increase their attachment to structures of democratic governance elsewhere. Our research found that union members were rather more likely to take part in ‘low-effort’ civic behaviours such as signing a petition, but were also very much more likely to do so in those civic behaviours that are the most onerous in terms of effort and time, such as participation in a public march or volunteering for a political party.

Union members learn that voting is part of life and are more apt to see the benefits arising from collective provision. Put another way, if workplace voice and civic voice are complements in the sense that they foster a shared understanding of democracy’s value then we can expect the decline of union representation to affect the civic attitudes and democratic behaviours of individuals outside of the workplace as well. The positive effect of union membership on broader civic engagement means its withering should be a cause of worry for all those who care about democracy.

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