Beyond Membership: The Institutional Embeddedness of Trade Unions and Their Persistence in Financialised European Banking

This paper investigates the persistence of trade unions in European banking despite sustained declines in membership density, falling labour-capital ratios, and increasing financialisation of the sector. While existing research consistently documents long-term decline in the unionisation rate across advanced economies, it offers limited understanding of how unions continue to exert influence in highly financialised and technologically transformed industries such as banking, where traditional foundations of collective organisation have been significantly weakened. Addressing this gap, the paper develops an institutionalist framework that shifts analytical attention from membership density to institutional embeddedness within governance and bargaining structures. It argues that union influence in European banking is not primarily determined by membership base but by the degree of structural integration into sectoral bargaining systems, organisational routines, and procedural rights integrated in restructuring processes. Within this configuration, unions operate as intermediary actors that buffer adjustment pressures, enable coordination, and shape the implementation of organisational change. The main hypothesis is that union persistence in European banking is explained primarily by institutional embeddedness rather than membership density, and that integrated unions function as stabilising actors within financialised organisational environments. An auxiliary hypothesis proposes that declining labour-capital ratios increase the functional relevance of unions by intensifying coordination challenges and raising demand for procedural mechanisms of restructuring and employment adjustment. Methodologically, the study adopts a multi-layered mixed-methods design combining quantitative sectoral indicators—union density, employment trends, banking assets, and labour–capital ratios— with qualitative evidence drawn from comparative analysis of collective bargaining systems, country case studies, semi-structured interviews, and survey data. This design enables a structured multi-level analysis linking macro-structural financialisation dynamics with meso-institutional arrangements and micro-organisational processes. The paper contributes to three strands of literature. First, it challenges density-centred accounts of union decline by demonstrating that organisational erosion does not necessarily imply institutional marginalisation. Second, it extends research on financialisation by showing how structural transformation in banking coexists with persistent forms of procedural labour inclusion. Third, it contributes to comparative political economy by conceptualising unions as embedded institutions that enhance coordination and systemic stability in financialised capitalism. Overall, the findings show that union power in European banking is not disappearing but being reconfigured through institutional integration within contemporary governance structures, producing a systematic decoupling between organisational size and institutional influence.