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Danish Trade Unions and Young People: Using Media in the Battle for Hearts and Minds

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Young Workers and Trade Unions

Abstract

Denmark has often been considered the industrial relations (IRs) model par excellence with high levels of union membership, density and collective bargaining1 (Due and Madsen, 2008). Over the last decade, however, the institutional context has transformed considerably (Jørgensen and Schulze, 2012). One of the most worrying trends is the decline in union membership, after many years of being one of the few advanced European economies in which union membership remained steady (Blanchflower, 2007). The decline has been most severe for the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO)2 and its affiliates; between 2000 and 2014, LO unions lost approximately a third of all their members, a drop from 1,208,000 to 867,000. One of the drivers is structural change in the composition of the workforce that has caused natural membership of LO unions to drop, and other sectors of the labour force to grow (see Table A5.1 in Appendix).

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Authors
  1. Torsten Geelan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Birmingham, UK

    Andy Hodder

  2. University of Greenwich, UK

    Lefteris Kretsos

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© 2015 Torsten Geelan

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Geelan, T. (2015). Danish Trade Unions and Young People: Using Media in the Battle for Hearts and Minds. In: Hodder, A., Kretsos, L. (eds) Young Workers and Trade Unions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429537_5

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