Employee collective voice and short-term sickness absence in Europe

The European Journal of Industrial Relations is the principal English-language forum for the analysis of key developments in European industrial relations and their theoretical and practical implications.

It embraces a broad definition of industrial relations and includes articles which relate to any aspect of work and employment. It publishes rigorous and innovative work on and from all European countries. All social science disciplines are relevant to its remit, and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged. A major objective is to foster cross national comparative analysis; for this reason, single country monographs are unlikely to be accepted unless framed by a strong comparative perspective. Work which relates European developments to broader global experience is welcome. Abstract:

This article analyses the relationship between employee collective voice, measured by union density and institutionalized forms of employee representation at enterprise level, and short-term sickness absence rates in 24 European countries over the period 1996–2010.

It relies on individual-level data on sickness absence from the European Labour Force Survey combined with country-level data on employee collective voice. There is a small but significant and non-trivial, negative relationship between employee collective voice and short-term sickness absence. Regression analysis suggests that if union density had remained at the 1996 level, short-term sickness absence would have been, on average, 2.5 hours lower per year than in 2010.