Between 1950 and 1980, labor markets grew increasingly organized in advanced industrial societies. Union membership in most countries expanded more rapidly than the labor force, centralized wage setting became more common, and union members became increasingly concentrated in a small number of large unions. Between 1980 and 1992, however, union density fell on average, and centralized wage setting grew increasingly rare. Only union concentration continued to increase in the 1980s. Existing theories of union organization and collective bargaining institutions are largely successful in explaining both the trends over time and much of the cross-national variation from 1950 to 1980, but they fail to account for the dramatic declines in union strength that some (but not all) countries have experienced since 1980.
