Union membership and job satisfaction over the life course

Abstract

Abstract We examine the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction over the life‐course using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracking all those born in Great Britain in a single week in March in 1958 through to age 55 (2013). We find there is a significant negative correlation between union membership and job satisfaction that is apparent across the life‐course. Lagged union membership status going back many years is negatively correlated with current job satisfaction, though its effects become statistically non‐significant when conditioning on current union membership status. These results provide a different perspective to longitudinal studies showing short‐term positive responses to switches in membership status. They are consistent with earlier work showing that this cohort of workers, and others before them, have persistently lower job satisfaction as union members compared to their non‐union counterparts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.