Labor Rights Protection and Individual Attitudes toward Redistribution

• In Event: Unions in a Changing World

Abstract

We argue that labor rights protection is an important moderator in explaining cross-national variation in redistributive attitudes. We posit that labor rights have different effects across different types of citizens. On the one hand, it promotes greater support for government redistribution from union members. Strong workers' rights are closely linked to centralized wage bargaining and collective labor relations, which shape greater solidarity among union members regardless of their income levels. Thus, it induces union members to support greater government redistribution. On the other hand, we argue strong labor rights lead to greater disapproval of government redistribution from non-union members or self-employed. Strong labor rights may promote the belief that the working class is able to pressure the government to push redistribution towards workers, not necessarily the redistribution towards those outside the unions or self-employed. To test these arguments, we combine the collective labor rights dataset and international social survey programme (ISSP) dataset. Consistent with our predictions, we find empirical support for our argument in 35 countries. While union members show greater support for government redistribution in countries with stronger labor rights protection, self-employed and non-union members are more likely to disapprove government redistribution when labor rights protection becomes more pronounced. We also find moderating effects of labor rights protection on the relationship between household income and government redistribution. When labor rights protection is high, household income becomes a strong predictor of government redistribution. However, its impact diminishes as the labor protection becomes weaker. Our empirical result is robust to using a different dependent variable, different model specifications and additional controls.
This paper makes several contributions to the literature on inequality and redistribution. First, we show that labor rights protection is an important contextual factor in explaining variation in redistributive attitudes. This paper suggests that the impact of labor rights protection is as strong as other well-known contextual factors (i.e., electoral systems, welfare progressivity). Relatedly, our paper suggests that a strong labor rights protection implies different contextual meanings for different segments of citizens. Specifically, strong labor rights may create a situation highlighting the conflict between working and non-working classes. While the working class individuals benefit greatly from the strong labor rights protection, it also generates non-working class citizens’ hostility towards the working class. Since non-working class people may perceive that government redistribution is solely targeted at the working class, they are likely to express greater objection to government redistribution in countries with greater labor right protections. Finally, this paper provides a new insight to the old question why sometimes the poor do not support government redistribution. We propose that this is somewhat related to the level of labor right protection. In countries with strong labor right protection, while the poor from the working class would support great governmental redistribution, the poor from the non-working class may disapprove the redistribution due to their relative animosity toward the working class.

Authors

• Sung Min Han, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

• Fangjin Ye, Michigan State University