Do Immigrants Trust Trade Unions? a Study of 16 Western European Countries

Trade unions' attitudes towards immigrants have received substantial scholarly attention. However, the attitudes of migrants themselves towards trade unions have barely been studied (especially via systematic surveys) despite migrants' longstanding reputation as a group that is difficult to organize. Migrants' unfavourable perceptions of unions could be one reason for such difficulties. Such perceptions may be shaped by the lack of a union tradition in migrants' countries of origin; by a general distrust of unions which, for example in Eastern Europe, formed part of the state apparatus; or by migrants' reactions to the unions' long history of opposition to immigration. Nonetheless, recent research in industrial relations demonstrates that there is little empirical support for the claim that immigrants and ethnic minorities are hostile to trade unionism. The paper therefore aims to bridge this gap in the literature by examining systematically migrants' attitudes towards trade unions compared to those of natives. Specifically, it analyses levels of trust in trade unions among different sub-groups of immigrants in comparison to those of natives across 16 Western European countries using data from the 2008 European Values Survey. Preliminary results demonstrate that, in general, first-generation migrants tend to express higher levels of trust in unions than natives in the overwhelming majority of the countries studied. The relative level of trust among second-generation immigrants varies more substantially across countries. In most countries, however, differences in the levels of trust in trade unions between second-generation immigrants and natives are much smaller than those between first-generation immigrants and natives.