Unions: Union Coverage In The Private Sector

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3. Why is union coverage in the private sector so much lower than coverage in the public sector and why has union coverage been much more stable among women than among men? Do you think young people today are attracted to unions? Explain why or why not?
Unions have been an important part of modern day society. It gives voices to the workers whose voices are not heard and promotes laws and standards, which help all of the unionized workers and even the non-unionized ones. However in today’s society we see trends in workplaces amongst men and women of different ages and their behaviors towards unions. Some are attracted to unions while some are not, however when a whole age group or gender is showing patterns in their behavior towards unions,
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Since 1962 when the participation of women in union was 16.4%, it has doubled to 36.4% in 1986. (p.17) This is due to several factors involving women’s participation in the workforce as well as occupying several sectors of the industry, which is already unionized. In a research paper by Marina C. Boehm from Queens university, (Boehm, 1991) she addresses several reasons as to why women have been more active in unions and how it was possible to have such a drastic change in unions in regards to women. One of the reasons she outlines is because multiple unions have actively helped and promote women in the workforce. In 1976 (p.8), Canadian labour Congress held its first women’s conference. This conference helped bring awareness to the situation and bring more women into the workforce. In table 2 in her research journal, we can see in 1986, the total membership of unionized employees in public sector is 309,526 of which women occupy half (p.20). In this article we can see the trend that women have a more stable involvement in union coverage as they occupy more jobs, which are unionized. Also another reason this might help women is that unions are actively fighting for better wages and equality standards for …show more content…
Throughout my personal experiences in the workforce I have found that unions and younger members of the workers don’t always see eye to eye. However it is important to view this problems broken down into age groups. In a research conducted by members of the University de Montreal, Mélanie Laroche and Mélanie Dufour-Poirier, both assistant professors view this problem and try to find out why the younger members of the workforce have a disconnect with union (Laroche, 2003). They perceived that workers aged from 15 to 21 would rather quit instead of looking into unions at their respective workplace. Workers aged from 25 and older would look into other options such as unionizing to fix problems at their workplace.(p. 3). In analyzing the age groups of 15-21 we see that their behavior of exit strategy rather than unionizing is caused they have a negative view on unions. They seek immediate results rather than change their workplace. Another reason why young workers don’t seek unionization is because their workplaces have many barriers to unionizing such as their workplaces are scattered its hard to unionize in small scattered locations in previous paragraphs. Another article written by Rafael Gomez, Morley Gunderson and Noah Meltz from the London School of Economics and Political Science (Gomez, Gunderson, Meltz, 2001), states that one of the reasons younger workers does not like unionization in Canada is