ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that household involvement is important and its effect differs by gender groups. Household involvement is an instance of multiple organizational membership that might affect union activism. The two hypotheses on family-union relationships involve two different concepts of household involvement. For the first hypothesis, household involvement means the extent of involvement in the family micro-mobilization context. For the second hypothesis, household involvement is the extent of an individual’s performing various household tasks that might compete with union activism. Family-work conflict research emphasized gender asymmetries in the effect of household involvement on work life. For women, different household variables have different relationships to union participation. The ideology effect, for women, is stronger and more significant for more patterns of union participation than for men. Grievances seem to motivate men’s union activism more than women’s activism.
