“Workers are defaulted to being non-union in employment relationships across the world.” But why must that be the case? What if union membership was the default, with scabs required to opt out? Noting that “roughly half of all workers across richer Anglophone countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, want to be union members but a majority cannot exercise their preference because they belong to a non-union workplace”, a group of academics has proposed a union default system that might strengthen union density, lower membership costs, and allow union resources to be deployed more effectively to organise new workplaces.
24 January 2019