Why Do Workers Join Unions? The Case of Israel

Abstract

The author argues that because almost all Israeli wage earners were covered by collective agreements in the early 1980s, neither the "collective voice" hypothesis nor the earnings premium hypothesis-the two prevailing explanations of workers' decision to join unions-was then applicable to Israel. Using 1982 survey data on Israeli workers, he examines four alternative explanations of unionization in Israel: nonwork benefits; political ideology; social values, especially workers' attitude toward unions as a means for solidarity; and work and demographic attributes, such as employing unit size, gender, ethnicity, education, and age. He finds that Israeli workers' decision to join the Israeli Federation of Labor-the Histadrut-can be explained in part by nonwork benefits of the Histadrut (health insurance and legal aid, for example) and by the workers' social values.One of the key questions in the study of labor unions is why workersjoin them. Most research addressing this question places a heavy emphasis on either the "collective voice" provided to workers by labor unions or the union premium added to workers' earnings. As a result, the possible role of such other factors as non-work benefits, political ideology, social values, and work and demographic attributes is often ignored.Some unique characteristics of the industrial relations system in Israel in past years make it a useful setting for studying workers' decision to join unions. In particular, in Israel the two prevailing explanations of workers' decision to join unions *Yitchak Haberfeld is Senior Lecturer of Industrial Relations at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He thanks Anat Milner and Yasmin Alkalay for assistance, Dalia Moore and Eppie Yaar for providing their data, and Yinon Cohen, Herbert Heneman III, and Yehouda Shenhav for comments and suggestions.were (until recently) irrelevant. First, the collective voice explanation could be ruled out because almost all wage earners in Israel were covered by collective agreements and were thus protected by unions regardless of their union status. Second, the union premium explanation was inapplicable because there was no union earnings premium in Israel. Whereas empirical research on this subject usually is faced with a hypothesized reciprocity between union status and earnings and, therefore, difficulty in deriving unbiased estimates of the effect of the union premium on the decision to join, the absence of a union effect on earnings in Israel provides a quasi-experimental setting in which we can derive Additional results, and copies of the programs used to generate the results presented here, are available from Yitchak Haberfeld at

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Adverse selection in group insurance: The virtues of failing to represent voters

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Participación sindical de los trabajadores en Argentina: principales determinantes y tendencias

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