Red State, Blue State Unionization: Partisan Social Sorting & Union Organizing

• In Event: Labor, Identity, and Intergroup Relations

Abstract

The U.S. labor movement has seen uneven success across industries in the post-industrial era. While workers recently suffered landmark defeats in union elections in traditional areas of strength from car manufacturing to logistics, the labor movement showed explosive growth in parts of the service sector such as coffee shops and higher education. We posit that a process of partisan social sorting in the U.S. (Mason 2018; Mason and Wronski 2018) has politicized support for unions in ways that are consequential to union election outcomes. As demographic groups polarize politically, bargaining units with majorities of workers from predominantly Democratic-leaning groups should be more positive about unionization than those with workers from predominantly Republican-leaning groups. We apply a mixed-methods approach to assess our hypotheses. Quantitatively, we first use data from the American National Elections Survey from the 1960’s to 2020 to analyze the relationship between ideology and group affect towards unions. Additionally, we collect data from the American Community Survey on industry-level demography in terms of race, gender, education, and generation to test the effect of industry demography on industry-level union election win-rates from 2001-2020, based on data from the National Labor Relations Board’s union election outcomes. Qualitatively, we have conducted interviews with workers who have experienced a union drive in their workplace in the past five years to confirm that social and political identities were relevant to their motivations for voting for or against unionizing in their workplace. The current focus will be on conducting interviews from “challenging” workplace contexts: male-dominated workplaces, conservative workers, and workers from failed union elections, with a particular emphasis on right-to-work states. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses point to the increasing importance of partisan social sorting over time for union success and failure across industries.

Authors

• Rael Almonte Reyes, Binghamton University

• Susan Lee Kang, CUNY- John Jay College

• David Attewell, University of Zurich