The Composition of Union Membership: The Role of Pensioners in Italy

Abstract

This paper considers changes in the membership composition of the three leading Italian trade union confederations during the last ®fteen years. The analysis emphasizes the remarkable growth of membership among pensioners and the drop in active workers. The key issue here is that intergenerational aspects of unions' membership components are taken into account in the bargaining process. Unions internalize unemployment externalities on pension bene®ts resultant on the wage outcome as they consider the welfare of all their members in the economy. A formulation of the union monopoly model with endogenous membership supports these ®ndings, while the econometric evaluation of the membership component effects shows that unions are forced to pursue wage moderation and improvements in employment conditions.

The Duration of Union Membership in Italy: A Research Note

“…After the mid‐seventies union density started to decline and all the main Italian unions have experienced a marked increase in the share of retired workers among their members, which is now above 50 percent. A broader picture of the recent evolution of the Italian system of industrial relations may be found in Baccaro, Carrieri, and Damiano (2003) and Chiarini (1999).…”

Law and Intergenerational Relationships

“…One example of this trend can be found in the case of Italy, where the percentage of pensioners who are members of the labor organizations rose from 7.4% in 1950 to 20.3% in 1980, and it continued to rise to 47.6% in 1996, when it constituted almost half the total membership of all the country’s labor organizations (Chiarini, 1999). The disparate pensioner organizations in Italy reorganized themselves into independent federations and became active, independent, and strong entities that influence everything that has to do with the rights of pensioners, not least producing a collective labor agreement in the field of pensions.…”

Ambiguity and Partisan Business Cycles

“…Camerer and Weber (1992) survey the earlier experimental literature on uncertainty reaction. 10 Chiarini (1999) argues that pensioners' political influence on the Italian trade-union confederation had increased in the 1990s and shows that it significantly accounts for part of the observed real wage moderation during this period.…”