Salaried Professionals and Union Membership: An Australian Perspective

Abstract

Using data from a sample of people who had graduated from the Western Australian Institute of Technology over a seven year period, a logistic regression approach was used to identify those individual and institutional characteristics of salaried professionals that significantly increased the probability of belonging to a union. Individual endowments and characteristics such as sex, marital status and previous unemployment history were shown not to be important determinants of union membership. Several individual characteristics such as level of full-time work experience, and an individual emphasis on job security were identified as important determinants of union membership amongst this group of salaried professionals; however, institutional characteristics such as industry and public versus private sector employment tended to dominate as predictors of union membership.