Our study examines youth attitudes towards unions over a 40-year period to try and understand whether today's young workers might be the ‘hero’ or the ‘villain’ in the tale of declining union membership rates in the United States. Using nationally representative time-lag data from high-school seniors (N = 104,742) spanning 1976–2015, we conducted time trend, birth cohort and generational analyses to provide an ‘apples to apples’ comparison of how youth have felt about unions at different points in time. We found that contemporary youth (or Millennials) hold similar union attitudes to those who came before them, though what predicts those attitudes has changed over time. Strikingly, we also found that the proportion of young people who hold no opinion about unions has more than doubled over the period under study, steadily rising from 14 per cent in 1976 to 33 per cent in 2015. This sizeable proportion of ‘agnostic’ youth should be alarming to unions, yet it also provides them with opportunities to shape youth attitudes through targeted outreach efforts.

中文翻译：

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英雄还是恶棍？青年对工会的态度如何随时间变化的队列和世代分析

我们的研究调查了 40 年来青年对工会的态度，试图了解当今的年轻工人可能是美国工会会员率下降的故事中的“英雄”还是“恶棍”。使用具有全国代表性的高中生时滞数据 ( N= 104,742) 跨越 1976 年至 2015 年，我们进行了时间趋势、出生队列和世代分析，以提供一个“苹果对苹果”的比较，比较青年人在不同时间点对工会的看法。我们发现当代青年（或千禧一代）与他们之前的人持有相似的工会态度，尽管预测这些态度的因素随着时间的推移而发生了变化。引人注目的是，我们还发现，在研究期间，对工会没有意见的年轻人的比例增加了一倍多，从 1976 年的 14% 稳步上升到 2015 年的 33%。这一相当大比例的“不可知论”青年工会应该感到震惊，但它也为他们提供了通过有针对性的外展工作来塑造青年态度的机会。