Complicated politics of union members: The effects of ideology and perception of class conflict on labor activism
Joanna Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Katarzyna Jaśko, Anna Potoczek, Agnieszka Kuhny
Jagiellonian University
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In recent years, we have observed a revival of labor union participation around the world. However, the question remains, why do most people, despite experiencing poor working conditions and violations of fundamental worker rights, not unionize? The goal of our research was to address this issue. Here, we would like to present results related to the relationship between political ideology, perceived class conflict, and willingness to support and engage in labor union actions. Drawing on goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al., 2002, 2015) and collective action literature, we predicted that people would be more willing to engage in labor activism if they are more left-leaning and if they perceive the existence of a class conflict than those who represent a more right-wing political ideology and do not see a conflict between workers and employers. We conducted two studies among workers (N = 2285) from Poland, the United States and India to test these hypotheses. Interestingly, our findings were partially consistent with the predictions, since ideological factors were not always strongly related to activism intentions (e.g., higher satisfaction with work was related to greater willingness to engage in labor unions. We discuss potential competing explanations of the observed effects, measurement issues, and potential practical implications.
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