>
> But some caution should be injected here. First of all, these figures aren't
> comparable - at least between France and the U.S. If you take the average
> American's common sense conception of what it means to be a "union member"
> and use that as your definition, "union density" in France is more than 90%.
> In other words, for most Americans, being a union member means (1) a union
> collectively negotiates your wages and working conditions; (2) there's a
> "union presence" in the workplace (e.g., where you can take grievances); and
> (3) union representatives have direct contact with you about politics and
> mobilizations. This describes more than 90% of French workers, but only 12%
> of American workers. There is a separate statistic called "bargaining
> coverage density," which the OECD also puts out; it refers to the % of
> workers covered by collective bargaining agreements. For America it's
> identical to "union density," for France it's more than 90%, for Germany I
> think it's something like 60%. I don't know how much of a "union presence"
> exists in Germany for "covered" workers who aren't members.
There's a scatter plot here with 'union density' and 'bargaining coverage density' on the axes (p. 146):
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/8/3/34846881.pdf
It's for 2000 so it's a little out of date, but it is really interesting. For me, especially because Australia is such an outlier among Anglo countries, with union density in the low 20s and bargaining coverage density above 80% (I imagine both are a little lower now). The political importance of unions here is certainly noticeable, and they showed a capacity for grand scale mobilisation at the end of the Howard era.
It's related of course to the legacy of the arbitration system. The relationship with militancy is ambiguous - the other side of the coin is that most workers benefit from unions without knowing about it or having to do anything - in a lot of ways arbitration and the award system has always been demobilising for the labour movement.
We had a spectacular demonstration of class struggle legalistic Australia-style at the weekend, when the airline Qantas grounded its entire fleet to lock out its troublesome workforce and trigger a 'national emergency' clause in the Fair Work Act, which led the industrial relations tribunal to order a termination of all industrial action and compulsory arbitration. The tribunal concluded that the three unions' actions were perfectly legal and would not have triggered the clause, but the lock-out did because of damage to business, tourism, etc. And yet management got exactly what it wanted.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4a87afa0-0442-11e1-98bc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1cV4IX8Ij
Mike