Employment-Based Property Rights

Effective employee job property rights have recently increased consequent on state-courts-imposed liabilities for management employment decisions. The acquisition, application, scope, and enforcement of these new job rights alter the incentive for union activity. After briefly describing employment-based property rights, recent additions to employee rights and their impacts on union-shop employees and union membership are discussed. Private sector union membership trends, measured as a percentage of the labor force, exhibit thirty years of decline for organized labor. Studies of the decreasing labor market density and economic importance of unions are generally divided into time series analyses of membership trends using macrodeterminants and cross-sectional analyses of individual employee decisions to support a union using microdeterminants [1]. The macro-level explanatory variables most consistently effective in explaining union membership include business cycles [1-3], employer opposition [4], structure of employment [5-6], and election characteristics [7]. Inquiries into the employees' decisions to support unions span the discussions of the Webbs and Marx on collective responses to the rise of capitalism, Perlman's "scarcity consciousness" [8] and cognitive dissonance theory [9]. One of the main approaches appearing in the literature focuses on employees' perceptions of union effectiveness in realizing their objectives. From this perspective, the union func­ tions as an instrumentality [9, 10] or has monopoly and voice-response faces [4]. Putatively, a union is one instrumentality or method for improving compensation and dealing with fairness issues in the workplace. *An earlier version of this article was presented at the July 1992, Western Economic Association meetings in San Francisco. © 1995, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. 87 doi: 10.2190/GTH4-2N8J-V0WF-C993 http://baywood.com