ABSTRACT
The starting point for this chapter is the fact that young workers are less likely to be members of trade unions than are older workers. This is documented in Table 3.1, which records the percentage of workers who are union members by age in 2001 in three surveys: the British Workplace Representation and Participation Survey (BWRPS), conducted in summer 2001; the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA), which has been conducted annually since 1981 (Jowell et al., 1999); and the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which has asked about unionization regularly since the early 1990s (Office of National Statistics, 2001). All three surveys show that young workers – defined here as those aged less than 30 years old – have a much lower rate of unionism than older workers. The gap is largest in the BWRPS (24 percentage points) and least in the BSAS (13 percentage points), with the LFS gap almost halfway in between (18 percentage points). The differences reflect the design of the surveys as well as sampling variability in the BWRPS and BSAS, which have relatively small samples of young workers. Sampling variability can be important because both the BWRPS and BSAS cover approximately 1,300 workers. By contrast, the LFS covers 60,000 or so workers. Since only about 10 per cent of the working population is in the young age group, the sample sizes for young persons in the BWRPS and BSAS are relatively small.
