Who Doesn’t Trust Unions?
In a previous post, I noted that confidence in organized labor really hasn’t changed that much over the past 30 years, even though union membership has been declining steadily.
This got me thinking about what kinds of factors (such as individual characteristics) are associated with being anti-union, and I decided to run a couple of simple, tentative models to get an idea. As you might recall from the previous post, respondents in my dataset (the General Social Survey) were asked whether they had “hardly any,” “only some,” or “a great deal” of confidence in organized labor. In 2010 (which is the year I’m using for this mini-analysis), 60 percent said that they had only some confidence, 30 percent hardly any, and a mere 10 percent asserted a great deal of faith in unions. For the purpose of simplicity, I will refer to those with “hardly any” confidence as “anti-union.”
I have to start with a few quick, optional-reading details about my data and analysis (read the notes in the graphs below if you want more information). Because so few people expressed “a great deal” of confidence, I collapse this category into the “only some” response, creating a two-category outcome variable measuring whether or not the respondent had “hardly any” confidence. The models I use (binary logit models) control for a variety of factors that might influence union attitudes, including