Free riders: the rise of alternative unionism in Denmark

• Published date: 01 November 2013
• Date: 01 November 2013
• Author: Laust Høgedahl,Flemming Ibsen,Steen Scheuer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12027

Free riders: the rise of alternative unionism

in Denmark

Flemming Ibsen, Laust Høgedahl and Steen Scheuer

ABSTRACT

In this article we analyse some disturbing trends in the Danish labour market: while

collective bargaining coverage is still relatively high, union density has been declining

and—worse than that—there has been a substantial shift away from recognised and

in favour of alternative unionism. The alternative unions are not parties to collective

agreements, and they offer membership much cheaper than the recognised unions, in

effect taking a free ride on the institutional supports that used to be effective only for

the recognised unions. The article explains this conundrum by pointing to the political

and institutional backgrounds to this development, which threatens to erode the very

basis for the Danish collective bargaining system. On the background of general

statistics and of a general employee survey, we point out the reasons behind the

challenges confronting the recognised unions, pointing out that the recognised unions

must become both more efficient in the member services and more cost efficient, if

they wish to halt the present downhill trend.

1 INTRODUCTION

One of the significant characteristics in the Danish labour market model has been the

high union density on both the employee and employer sides of the equation. This has

meant broad support to the trade unions, which gave them the strength to develop

another feature: collective bargaining agreements on wages and working conditions

with the employer organisations in both the public and private sectors, agreements

based on a voluntary approach and yet with a relatively high coverage. This bargain-

ing model therefore rests on the continued support of the recognised unions (under-

stood as unions that have been recognised for bargaining purposes by being part of

one or more national agreements with employers), but this support has been waning

over the past 10–15 years because of two trends: some employees have increasingly

chosen to be leave unionism altogether, whereas others have opted out of the recog-

nised unions, instead choosing so-called ideologically alternative unions, particularly

the Christian labour movement. The characteristic feature of the alternative unions is

that they are not, or only in very few instances, parties to collective bargaining

❒Flemming Ibsen is Professor and Laust Høgedahl is PhD Fellow, both at the Department of Political

Science, Aalborg University, Denmark. Steen Scheuer is Professor at the Department of Leadership and

Corporate Strategy, University of Southern Denmark. Correspondence should be addressed to Flemming

Ibsen, Department of Political Science, Aalborg University, Fibigerstræde 1, DK-9220 Aalborg Ø,

Denmark; email: ibsen@dps.aau.dk

Industrial Relations Journal 44:5–6, 444–461

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2013 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

agreements and they can therefore only offer a package consisting of an unemploy-

ment insurance fund (UIF) and a trade union, yet at a significantly lower price than

the recognised organisations under the three peak associations: Landsorganisationen

i Danmark [LO (the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions)], Fællesrådet for

Tjenestemænd og Funktionærer [FTF (the Confederation of Professionals in

Denmark)] and Akademikernes Centralorganisation [AC (the Danish Confederation

of Professional Associations)].

The price differences have always existed in the period that the alternative unions

have existed, but they have obtained special significance after the creation of what is

more akin to a trade union market, caused by changed legislation under the right-of-

centre government in Denmark in the period 2001–11. The aggressive price compe-

tition and marketing strategies of the alternative unions have led to a veritable exodus

of members, particularly from the LO unions, to the alternative unions. Parallel to the

exodus of members from the LO unions to the alternative unions, Denmark has seen

a steadily increasing number of workers opt to remain unorganised. If the recognised

LO unions continue to lose members, it will ultimately mean the weakening of the

Danish model, as recognised unions may become weakened to a degree where they

would no longer appear as credible representatives of the workforce.

The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, we describe the development

in the membership among the trade unions in the Danish labour market in the period

from 1995 to 2011, where we document the massive flight of members from the LO

unions to the alternative ones (Ibsen et al., 2012). The second part provides a

historical-institutional analysis of the causes contributing to the growth of a market

for UIFs and trade union membership, and the market form in this market is analysed

with the help of microeconomic theory. In the third and final part we analyse the

reasons why the actors themselves indicate as being their reasons for switching unions

in relation to collective action theory (Booth, 1985; Frege and Kelly, 2006; Olson,

1965; Schnabel and Wagner, 2007; Visser, 2002).

2 DATA AND METHODOLOGY

Analyses of changes in union membership and union density are usually based on

aggregate statistics, which we also employ here, but in order to analyse actor motives

related to shift in membership status (member, non-member, member of traditional

union versus alternative union, etc.), we have conducted a major cross-sectional

survey, as we describe in this section. Because our interest was focused on why

employees would shift from one membership state to another, we included in the

survey the following sets of questions:

For respondents who replied that they were union members, we asked whether they

had been members of another union earlier on, and if yes, which union this was.

For respondents who replied that they were not union members, we asked whether

they had been members of a union earlier on, and if yes, which union this was.

This enabled us to establish membership flows between the different types of unions

and between being unionised and becoming non-unionised, providing insights that go

beyond what the aggregate statistics supply. Furthermore, we asked all those who had

either moved from one union to another or from membership to non-membership

what was their rationale for doing so, supplying a number of pre-coded (closed)

answering options. In doing this, we become able to analyse actual membership flows

in combination with the respondents’ (post hoc) rationalisations hereof. Obviously,

445The rise of alternative unionism in Denmark

© 2013 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd