Earlier chapters have shown us that: the decline in union density can be partly explained by structural change in the labour market, but that this change cannot explain the deterioration in union membership in the 1990s; that declining union density cannot be blamed on falling sympathy for unions – indeed, it appears that sympathy for unions has increased since the early 1980s; and that what little evidence there is does not suggest that there has been a decline in employees' perceptions of union performance or union propensity. In this chapter we turn from structural to institutional influences on decline in union membership: changes in the approaches of employers and governments to unions, and in the fundamental determinants of union membership.

An Overview of the Institutional Break

Price and Bain (1989) proposed that, while relationships governing union membership would mostly be stable and cyclical (explicable by business-cycle variations), at particular times there could be fundamental changes or ‘paradigm shifts’ to those relationships. These institutional breaks emerge from particularly forceful conjunctions of social or economic events and powerful alliances of some of the participants in industrial relations, and alter the institutional arrangements surrounding the employment relationship. A paradigm shift creates ‘new patterns in the context of industrial relations’, principally changes in ‘labour laws and the powers and roles of regulatory agencies, employer policies towards unionisation and collective bargaining, and union structures, political activities and ideologies’ (Chaison & Rose 1991).