Seventeenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Models of union commitment in existing research have been quite stable since the turn of the millennia. Some argue that retired union members in the United States may be unlikely to continue to support their unions due to the country’s individualistic culture, based on a cross-country comparison with the Japan and South Korea. We interpret this invariability as an outcome of the monolithic assumption that the commitment of all union members to their labor unions can be described by a singular model. In contrast, we examine the issue of union commitment by emphasizing the salience of a particular demographic characteristic — retiree status — in model articulation. Survey data from an industrial labor union at two time points is analyzed to show that existing models fail to account for this unique and growing subgroup of labor union members in the United States. Our case study produced a model of union commitment that pertains specifically to retirees in a localized context. We believe this finding reveals a path for future research in this field: a future in which union commitment may become represented in scholarly literature by an array of models variegated by the unique characteristics of the union members being analyzed, rather than by a universal model.