Too Few Indians and Too Many Chiefs. Is This One Reason for Declining Trade Union Membership in Denmark?
Abstract
The decline in trade union membership in many countries since the 1970s and the consequent weakening of the trade unions is due to a number of reasons, including occupational changes, welfare state and social regulation, liberalism and individualization, and in Denmark (and Sweden and Finland) changes in unemployment insurance legislation and the institutional settings of the unemployment insurance system. All these factors are well known and have been analyzed in the literature. This article sums up all these facts and reasons for trade union decline in Denmark, but the main analysis focuses on a supplementary reason for membership decline among LO (the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions)-affiliated unions: many trade union members leave their unions to become members of unions that organize managers. When workers become managers, some prefer to join an organization expert in servicing managerial staff, while others leave their trade unions because they define themselves as managers without being formally appointed as such and without having formal managerial responsibilities. Reasons for this behavior will be discussed in the article.Author Biographies
Associate Professor in Industrial Relations. email: jlind@id.aau.dk
Copyright (c) 2012 Author and Journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holder of this Journal is the authors and the Journal. This Journal gives Open Access with CreativeCommons license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.
You can download all the content of the Journal and share it with others as long as you credit the authors and the journal, but you can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.
More specifically this license means that you – authors and users – may:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form as long as you follow the license terms. The freedom to share includes parallel publishing on authors’ own website and in institutional repositories or in ResearchGate after publication in NJWLS, or if you want to reprint your article as part of publication of a PhD-thesis or a dissertation
You may share under these terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit and provide a link to the license. Appropriate credit implies that you provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. The link used should be its DOI.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. A commercial use is one primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation.
NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. Merely changing the format never creates a derivative.
Exceptions to the license terms may be granted
If you want to use content in the Journal in another way then described by this license, you must contact the licensor and ask for permission. Contact Bo Carstens at bo@nordicwl.dk. Exceptions are always given for specific purposes and specific content only.
Sherpa/Romeo
The Journal is listed as a blue journal in Sherpa/Romeo, meaning that the author can archive post-print ((ie final draft post-refereeing) and author can archive publisher's version/PDF.
Copyright of others
Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere.
Archives policy
All published material is archived at Roskilde University Library, Denmark, and transmitted to the Danish Royal Library in conformity with the Danish rules of legal deposit.
Plagiarism screening
We do not screen articles for plagiarism. It is the responsibility of the authors to make sure they do not plagiate.
