Trade union membership identification and its influences on workers’ wage in China

Abstract

As a representative of workers’ interests, ACFTU is reforming in an attempt to play a more important role in primary income distribution. ACFTU defines union member as all staff and workers within enterprises that have established trade unions, which means an employee is calculated as a union member if his/her firm has union organization, so an individual’s union status depends on the employer’s willingness to accept trade unions. Union density is the ratio between union member and all the nation’s staff and workers. This may be referred to as the «ACFTU standard». By using an «employer-employee» matched survey data, the paper uses OLS method to analyze the union wage effect. Results show that a union has a positive influence on workers’ hourly wage, but not significantly so on the weekly and monthly wage. The reasons for this are that unionized workplaces have high human capital level and more strictly abide by labor regulations. The paper also compares three different union variables to identify the union status. The results show that the union wage effects cover all workers, rather than only those who admit as union members, and a part of the unions do not fulfill the responsibility of improving workers’ interests, which undermines actual union influences. As a conclusion, ACFTU should pay more attention to the protection of low-skilled workers, such as migrants and female workers, and increase the scope of collective wage negotiation through regional and industrial collective contracts.

Keywords

• acftu, collective negotiation, wage effect, union status