Union Decline:A Geography Based Assessment

This paper discusses the factors that led to the decline in unionization worldwide, based on a review of literature between the years 1995 and 2013. The paper first traces the factors that led to the decline based on geographies, followed by those that led to the decline of unionization in five countries namely United States of America, Britain, Germany, India and China. These countries have been chosen more as a convenience sampling rather than being representative of any economy or geography. The factors leading to union decline has been categorized into economic factors, socio-political factors, cyclical factors, structural factors and other factors. It needs to be mentioned that there are a lot of idiosyncrasies and there is no "iron law" of trade union decline.