A structural model of race, gender, class, and attitudes toward labor unions

Abstract

This paper develops a theoretical model that explains how race, gender, and class affect people’s attitudes toward labor unions. The model predicates that race and gender stratify people into social and economic classes and that race, gender, and class influence people’s attitudes toward labor unions directly and indirectly through their experience of economic hardship. The study uses data from the 1991 General Social Survey to test the model. The results showed that race and gender affect people’s socioeconomic position, and that race and class affect union attitudes directly and indirectly through negative economic events. Gender, however, does not have a direct effect on union attitudes but has an indirect effect on union attitudes through disadvantaged socioeconomic position.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and Judi L. King for stylistic improvements on the manuscript.

Notes

1 An examination of correlations suggests that the level of multicollinearity is not too high. The problem of multicollinearity occurs when two or more of the independent variables are perfectly or highly correlated. Multicollinearity may attenuate the effect of an independent variable on the dependent variable but the coefficient estimator remains unbiased (Hayduk, 1987).