Employers' associations and trade unions: co-existence or more?

We discuss the interrelationship between membership in employers' associations and the exis- tence of trade unions. The analysis is based on both aggregate data for 13 European countries for 1980{2019 and firm-level data for 12 of these countries from the European Company Survey (ECS) for 2013 and 2019. Our findings suggest that at the aggregate level there is potentially a dependence between membership in the two types of organizations despite the fact that mem- bership in the two organizations appear to respond differently to macroeconomic conditions and to different institutional parameters. The firm-level data suggest that such a dependence might exist in some countries while the two organizations simply co-exist in most countries. The firm-level analysis confirms a number of stylized facts found in other analyses; larger and longer-established firms are more likely to belong to an EA and firms enforcing a collective agreement signed outside the remit of the firm are also more likely to be members of an EA and have union presence. The analysis is fraught with difficulties as, inter alia, the evolving nature of the two types of organizations makes it more difficult to ascertain the type of co-habitation between the two.