Unionization & employee engagement.

• Author: Ladd, Scott
• Position: HUMAN CAPITAL - Survey - Brief article

With battle lines formed between unions and government in Ohio, Wisconsin and other states, most of the attention has been focused on the amount of general public support for organized labor.

But Modern Survey, a human capital-measurement company headquartered in Minneapolis, want ed to know whether workers who are already members of unions were engaged and productive, and how interested nonunion employees were in joining a particular union and under what circumstances.

Union members tended to be more disengaged than their nonunion counterparts--33 percent to 28 percent, the survey found. Nonunion respondents were more likely to describe themselves as moderately or fully engaged by their jobs--36 percent of the nonunionized workers described themselves this way, compared with 30 percent of unionized respondents.

When asked if they would vote "yes" if given the chance to be represented by a union, nearly half of the nonunion survey pool--47 percent--said no.

In its analysis, Modern Survey determined that "confidence in the future of the company" was the strongest predictor of whether an employee would like to be represented by a union...