Trade Unions and Workers’ Health

2026-07-22

The core purpose of UHealth is to assess the relationship between trade unions and workers’ health taking a broad definition of what trade unions are and looking at several health indictors including physical and mental health and wellbeing. This innovative project will assess the specific dimensions the underlie such a relationship within three work packages (WP). WP1 will employ several longitudinal British Birth Cohorts to examine the extent to which trade union membership and trade union presence within the company as well as changes in the collective bargaining structure over the life course are associated with changes in health outcomes. WP2 will compare five countries (Germany, Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan) using specific panel homogenised datasets to better capture how the presence of a trade union within the workplace could impact health and wellbeing both directly and indirectly through job satisfaction, gender pay gap, precarious employment and flexible work arrangements. Specific attention will be given to national collective negotiation structures. For both packages, sensitivity analyses will test model assumptions and longitudinal analyses and negative outcomes and propensity score matching will be used to assess causation and intervention selection. Finally, using a qualitative comparative approach of the freight transport and cleaning sectors in the United Kingdom and Belgium, WP3 will pay attention to the way trade unions organisations are involved in health and safety committees and how workers’ health is an object of collective negotiation across different types of national and international structures that vary across countries and sectors. UHealth will result in a set-change in research on the work and employment determinants of health providing evidence for research and policy communities to reduce health inequalities.

Belgium

2026-02-01