From Playstations to Workstations: Young Workers and the Experience-Good Model of Union Membership

Union membership confers certain benefits to workers. Some of these benefits, like the union wage premium, are visible to both members and non-members alike. Most others, such as the enforcement of procedural justice or the establishment of family friendly practices, are hard to identify before entering the labour market and near impossible if one has never sampled union membership (Fernie and Gray, 2002). It is only when a worker has actually been employed in a unionised environment for a long enough duration, or, when a worker has access to reliable information about the nature of unionisation, that s/he can form an accurate opinion about the value of membership (i.e., whether the benefits of joining a union outweigh any of the potential costs). If workers never experience any of these hard-to-observe benefits, they may be less inclined to become active dues paying members where unions are present, and even less likely to actively organise in workplaces lacking any union presence. This is especially the case if, as recent British and American research suggests, the largest and most visible benefit (i.e. the wage advantage conferred to unionised workers) has largely disappeared (Blanchflower and Bryson, 2003).