This study is about union participation in Korea, where job security of university workers recently has been decreased. The study aims to examine the relationship between perceived union instrumentality and union participation, and the moderating effects of job insecurity to the relationship.
Based on the surveys for over 300 workers at four-year private universities in Korea, perceived union instrumentality had a positive effect on union participation. This result confirms the previous empirical analyses from overseas in Korea. Job insecurity, however, did not show a moderating effect on the relationship between perceived union instrumentality and union participation.
To reconfirm the empirical analysis on the moderating effect, a simple measure for job insecurity was used: single item for job insecurity, ''the possibility of uncertainty about the future of my university''. With this single item measure, job insecurity shows a moderating effect of strengthening the relationship between union instrumentality and union participation.
This study may add additional knowledge to the job insecurity of the private university staff in Korea, which is not yet actively studied. In practice, it has shown that labor unions can play a role as mechanism for solving job insecurity of private university workers and emphasizing the need for labor-management trust and cooperative relations.
Future studies should consider the expansion of research scope to two- or three-year college workers and to the universities that do not have trade unions. In addition, the university location should be further segmented and analyzed. A more diverse and sophisticated study of key research variables will yield more meaningful results.
This study has a limit on the fact that the time period of the analysis is when the job insecurity was not fully perceived by university members even the time is coming to them. It may be better to redo the study after 2020, when the job insecurity is fully perceived by the university workers.