Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Seymour Martin Lipset
Hazel Professor of Public Policy, The Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia, USA
August 31, 1998
I am pleased to learn of your new programme. I certainly would like to cooperate with it. At present, Noah Meltz of the University of Toronto and 1 are involved in a study seeking to understand the different union density rates in Canada (36 percent) and the U.S. (14 percent), along with the fact that Canadian unions have grown or not fallen from the 60's on, while the American unions have dropped steadily in this period. We will keep you informed.
As to other items that you list, I would suggest:
a. An inventory of public opinion studies and findings relevant to unions. Currently, it is difficult to do systematic comparative work. There is a great deal of data collected by unions, employers, government, and academics. Political research often asks about unions.
b. Systematic reliable cross-national data on union membership and collective bargaining coverage. Existing disparate reports often disagree. We need information on different federations within the same country, as well as internal breakdowns.
c. A data base on the legal position of unions. How do they gain recognition or collective bargaining rights? Are there any restrictions on closed or union shops, etc?
d. The political behavior, involvement and affiliations of unions in each country.
Much of this information is difficult for scholars to obtain in a systematic fashion. But it is easily available within each country. Thus I could secure it for the United States. The one problem is to try to make certain that each national reporter is using the same classifications as others.
It would be even more useful, if we could get data over time.
I hope you find some of these suggestions useful.
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