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Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Declining Union Organization
Abstract
New union members in the United States are typically gained through workplace elections. We find that the annual number of union elections fell by 50 per cent in the early 1980s. A formal model indicates that declining union election activity may be due to an unfavourable political climate which raises the costs of unionization, even though the union win-rate remains unaffected. We relate the timing of declining election activity to the air-traffic controllers' strike of 1981, and the appointment of the Reagan Labor Board in 1983. Empirical analysis shows that the fall in election activity preceded these developments. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2002.
... While Reagan took office in the context of a regulated labor market, Thatcher encountered a voluntarist system of industrial relations (Howell, 2015). Reagan and subsequent presidents may have left relatively unaltered the New Deal era federal labor law (Fiorito, 2007), but they deliberately shifted the balance of power on the National Labor Relations Board in favor of employers (Farber and Western, 2002). Under this new regime, employers enjoyed increased freedom to fire union supporters, obtained more latitude to spread misleading information about unions, and benefitted from a deregulation of reprisals against strikers (Farber and Western, 2002). ...
... Reagan and subsequent presidents may have left relatively unaltered the New Deal era federal labor law (Fiorito, 2007), but they deliberately shifted the balance of power on the National Labor Relations Board in favor of employers (Farber and Western, 2002). Under this new regime, employers enjoyed increased freedom to fire union supporters, obtained more latitude to spread misleading information about unions, and benefitted from a deregulation of reprisals against strikers (Farber and Western, 2002). In the United Kingdom, a key strategy to weaken organized labor involved the abolition of the closed shop (which requires union membership as a condition of employment). ...
... 3 In both the USA and the UK, neoliberal leaders also engaged in high profile showdowns with striking workers. In the United States, only one year into his presidency (1981), Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers' union (PATCO) and replaced them with non-union workers (Farber and Western, 2002). While already legal according to a 1938 Supreme Court decision (Fiorito, 2007), the practice of replacing striking workers with nonunion employees increased after Reagan's intervention (Farber and Western, 2002). ...
This article critically interrogates the meaning of freedom and its current and potential relationship with social relations in and around work as introduction to this special issue. This interrogation is vital given neoliberalism’s evaluative promise for more individual and corporate freedom, while concurrently limiting the conditions for the experience/expression of freedom of workers. Consequently, there are concerns about working for “private governments”, workers being subject to electronic surveillance, and workers increasingly caught up in structural disadvantages (i.e. precarious work) that contribute to growing unfreedom. Rather than reproducing abstract principles around freedom, this article and special issue advance a contextually sensitive emergence of freedom. We explicate this emergence as (i) alternative experiences of freedom, (ii) alternative conceptions of freedom, and (iii) alternative modes of organizing. To inspire future research, we extend these themes to suggest that treating freedom (i) as pluralist/relational and (ii) as having the capacity for world-making has meaningful implications for how work is organized and for whose benefit. We advocate an explicit turn to non-neoliberal values (e.g. collectivism, solidarity, human dignity, respect, and recognition) to enable more relational versions of freedom that can serve as a basis for freedom as world-making at work and in society.
... Additionally, the absence of unions contributes to income inequality because without the strong political voice of unions, there is often a lack of political willpower to create higher minimum wages and other benefits for workers (Fortin & Lemieux 1997). Scholars of labor relations have been vigorously engaged in teasing out possible explanations for union decline (Farber & Western 2002;Goldfield 1987;Logan 2006;Tope & Jacobs 2009). ...
... Reagan, in particular, is singled out for creating a highly anti-union environment in the U.S. (Farber & Western 2002;Flynn 2000;Levy 1985;Logan 2006). In their study of union elections, Farber and Western (2002) show that elections declined by 50 percent during the early 1980s, a development they trace to Reagan's firing and replacement of unionized air traffic controllers in 1981, and to Reagan's NLRB appointments, particularly that of Dotson, an openly anti-union steel industry attorney. ...
... Reagan, in particular, is singled out for creating a highly anti-union environment in the U.S. (Farber & Western 2002;Flynn 2000;Levy 1985;Logan 2006). In their study of union elections, Farber and Western (2002) show that elections declined by 50 percent during the early 1980s, a development they trace to Reagan's firing and replacement of unionized air traffic controllers in 1981, and to Reagan's NLRB appointments, particularly that of Dotson, an openly anti-union steel industry attorney. Both hostile and symbolic actions such as Reagan's firings and the dominance of management-side board members over the past several decades clearly have implications for labor law and membership outcomes. ...
Private sector unionization has declined dramatically over the past several decades. This dissertation examines private sector union decline through two related but distinct studies. Using a content analysis of 300 cases from the National Labor Relations Board, the first study explores management’s strategies of resistance to unionization and regional variation in this resistance. Using the same dataset, the second study investigates whether both movement proponents and movement adversaries use emotions, and if so, how, in the context of unionization movements. It further examines whether the priming of specific emotions by movement proponents and/or adversaries might be a contributing factor to the decline of union election wins.
Key findings from the study of management resistance include evidence of widespread management resistance to union threat, and a resistance to union threat that is consistent with a regionally specific threat weakness explanation of movement repression. Key findings from the study of management and employee emotion priming include evidence of widespread emotion priming from both groups, and evidence that the priming of certain key emotions influences election outcomes negatively. Taken together, these studies contribute to the literatures on social movement repression, union decline, and emotions. The dissertation concludes with a review of study limitations and suggestions for future research.
... Over time, the Board has experienced declining caseloads, a phenomenon that has been linked to the increasingly unfavorable organizing climate, even while researchers have not been able to link declines in union organizing to any particular watershed event such as Reagan's breaking of the air traffic controller's strike in 1981 (Farber and Western 2002). The number of union certification elections generally increased in the years after the passage of the NLRA, nearly reaching 9,000 a year in the late 1970s, but the 1980s saw a precipitous decline from around 8,000 in 1980 to 4,400 by 1990 (Farber and Western 2002) and hasn't risen above 4000 since then. ...
... Over time, the Board has experienced declining caseloads, a phenomenon that has been linked to the increasingly unfavorable organizing climate, even while researchers have not been able to link declines in union organizing to any particular watershed event such as Reagan's breaking of the air traffic controller's strike in 1981 (Farber and Western 2002). The number of union certification elections generally increased in the years after the passage of the NLRA, nearly reaching 9,000 a year in the late 1970s, but the 1980s saw a precipitous decline from around 8,000 in 1980 to 4,400 by 1990 (Farber and Western 2002) and hasn't risen above 4000 since then. Alongside certification elections, the numbers of "unfair labor practices" charges have declined. ...
This dissertation examines recent efforts to refocus the enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)—the 1935 statute that granted workers the right to organize, strike, and bargain collectively. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has come under immense criticism for its inability to exploit the law to protect workers’ right to unionize in the face of economic changes and increased employer hostility to unions. Yet, in recent years officials in the agency have sought to expand their reach by promoting the NLRA's Section 7, which grants workers the right to “concerted activity” regardless of their union membership. By attempting to reach non-unionized workers who can mobilize the law to protect themselves when they voice demands to their employers, the Board has acknowledged that many workers today labor outside of unions’ reaches and are nevertheless in need of protections for self-organization and voice in the workplace. I explore these developments in the agency, along with the response from worker organizations and workers, and thus speak to the question of whether and how latent resources in existing laws can be deployed to protect disadvantaged groups. Drawing on agency documents and interviews, I find significant variation in the level to which agency officials have sought to reach non-unionized workers, especially at the regional level. Officials are more likely to conduct proactive outreach with groups representing non-unionized workers in parts of the country where they have more information about their needs. That information stems from organizing efforts from diverse organizations. Likewise, as more worker organizations—often referred to as “worker centers”—have learned about the relevance of the NLRA, only some of them have gone on to mobilize it. This finding can be traced to organizational identities and logics that make some laws more obvious tools than others. The dissertation thus speak to the opportunities and constraints that exist in laws long “on the books.” While laws may contain latent resources that can benefit disadvantaged groups, their potential is limited by the law's social embeddedness, and in particular, the relationships and identities that shape whether and how information about a statute is received and interpreted by societal and state actors alike.
... However, despite its success, the "Treaty of Detroit" system faced significant stress during the mid-to-late 1970s "stagflation" era, and, eventually, the system collapsed. Farber and Western (2002), Levy and Temin (2007), and Brennan (2016) highlight the Reagan administration's handling of the air traffic controller's strike in 1981 and the administration's appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as significant moments in the fed- eral government's handling of organized labor. During the air traffic controller's strike, the administration relieved the con- trollers and hired non-union workers instead. ...
... Interestingly, this corresponds with the political changes ushered in by the Reagan administration. Prior to Flanagan, Clawson and Clawson (1987) and Farber and Western (2002) note that opposi- tion to union organization began in the Carter administration. In particular, they highlight the "surprise" failure of the Labor Law Reform Act of 1978, which unions wanted passed to help combat what they viewed as violations of labor organizing law. ...
Using data on U.S. state-level inequality from Frank et al. (2015) and state-level unionization data from Hirsch et al. (2001), this paper shows that unions have a negative impact on income inequality in U.S. states. In particular, higher rates of unionization decreased inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, the share of income accruing to the top 1% of earners, and the share of income accruing to the top 10% of earners. The findings are robust across several estimation methods and also when union coverage is used as an alternative to the percent of workers in unions.
... As it can be seen it measures the share of imported goods in each industry. The external trade industry share is measured by: (11) The ETIS measures the transactions with the rest of the world that an industry has as a share of its GDP. ...
... Another explanation for the decline in the rate of unionized workers is the institutional and the political changes against unions that happened in the 1980's (Farber and Western, 2001). ...
There are four different hypotheses analyzed in the literature that ex-plain deunionization, namely: the decrease in the demand for union rep-resentation by the workers the impact of globalization over unionization rates technical change and changes in the legal and political systems against unions. This paper aims to test all of them. We estimate a logis-tic regression using panel data procedure with 35 industries from 1973 to 1999 and conclude that the four hypotheses can not be rejected by the data. We also use a variance analysis decomposition to study the impact of these variables over the drop in unionization rates. In the model with no demographic variables the results show that these economic(tested) variables can account from 10% to 12% of the drop in unionization . However, when we include demographic variables these tested variables can account from 10% to 35% in the total variation of unionization rates. In this case the four hypotheses tested can explain up to 50% of the total drop in unionization rates explained by the model.
... Union coverage fell from 1947 onward, and rapidly since the 1980s (Jones and Schmitt 2014). Deindustrialization, the decline of employment in sectors where unions traditionally were strong, and the growth of employment in the service sector where traditionally they had little presence played a significant role in explaining the decline in union coverage (Farber and Western 2002). Government policies in the early 1980s also made union organizing more difficult. ...
This chapter focuses on the US to examine trends in union coverage and its advantages by gender, updating earlier analysis by Hartmann, Spalter-Roth, and Collins (1994). Analyzing data from the US Current Population Survey, we examine trends between 1989 and 2018 on
union coverage by gender, race and ethnicity, sector and education, highlighting the dramatic decline of union coverage in the US during the last three decades. We show the continuing role of occupational and sector segregation in understanding gender differences in union membership, and the growing role of the public sector, and women’s work in this sector, for the union movement in the US. We then present data on the union wage and benefits advantage. We conclude with a discussion on the role of unions for equality.
... 'Thatcher's Children', roughly corresponding to members of Generation X) were more right wing in their social and economic values than preceding generations; surprisingly, these values became further entrenched among 'Blair's Babies', the cohort that grew up under the subsequent New Labour era (Grasso et al. 2017). While these findings suggest that, at least in the United Kingdom, a generational shift in social attitudes may have occurred, we do not know whether these changes extend to individuals' union attitudes and, further, whether these findings are relevant to other Western countries with prolonged periods of conservative rule (e.g. the United States under the Reagan administration; see, for example, Farber and Western 2002). ...
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.
... 'Thatcher's Children', roughly corresponding to members of Generation X) were more right wing in their social and economic values than preceding generations; surprisingly, these values became further entrenched among 'Blair's Babies', the cohort that grew up under the subsequent New Labour era (Grasso et al. 2017). While these findings suggest that, at least in the United Kingdom, a generational shift in social attitudes may have occurred, we do not know whether these changes extend to individuals' union attitudes and, further, whether these findings are relevant to other Western countries with prolonged periods of conservative rule (e.g. the United States under the Reagan administration; see, for example, Farber and Western 2002). ...
... Wage-setting frictions play virtually no role for mismatch. This …nding is consistent with the ‡exibility of the U.S. market, which is characterized by ‡exible wages, particularly for newly hired workers (Haefke, Sonntag, and van Rens (2013)), and by low levels of unionization since the 1980s (Farber and Western (2002)). We make no claim that our results apply to di¤erent countries or di¤erent time periods, and it is quite possible that in European countries, for instance, both worker-mobility frictions and wage-setting frictions are much more important due to language barriers and more rigid wage-setting institutions. ...
We investigate unemployment due to mismatch in the United States over the past three and a half decades. We propose an accounting framework that allows us to estimate the contribution of each of the frictions that generated labor market mismatch. Barriers to job mobility account for the largest part of mismatch unemployment, with a smaller role for barriers to worker mobility. We find little contribution of wage-setting frictions to mismatch.
... The world economy has become increasingly globalise since the mid-1980s and the Western industrialised countries economic structure has changed more often from high unionised industrial sector to a low and challenging to unionise service sector. There has been an overall of continuous decline on the union membership (Galenson, 1994;Farber & Western, 2002;Martinez Lucio, Walker, & Trevorrow, 2009). ...
... By requiring employees to organize workplace by workplace, US industrial relations law demands that unions organize new establishments at a high rate just to maintain their membership levels. Unions have largely failed to surmount this hurdle since the 1950s (Farber & Western, 2001), but the early 1980s witnessed a major collapse in the level of union organization (Farber & Western, 2002;Tope & Jacobs, 2009). Although there is some dispute over exactly when union organizing began to decline, the timing roughly coincides with employers' increased push into the political arena and the election of a Republican president who was notably hostile toward unions. ...
... Concerning trade unions, Hayek emphasized the need to end what he considered harmful 'collusive' relationships between employers and unions (Richardson, 1993), where both sides aimed to balance their differing interests (in the vein of the so-called 'German model'). Neoliberal thinking influenced governments to 'take on' unions in set-piece disputes, particularly in the Anglo-American context, such as in the Reagan administration's 1981 conflict with air traffic controllers (Farber & Western, 2002), and the Thatcher government's mid-1980s dispute with the National Union of Mineworkers (Towers, 1989). The defeat of trade unions in these disputes decisively recast common understanding regarding the nature of labour relations along neoliberal lines, entrenching another key aspect of the neoliberal thought style in politico-economic thinking. ...
The paper adopts an organizational perspective to explore the conditions of possibility of the recent re-emergence of overt class-based discourse on one hand, epitomized by the 'We are the 99%' movement, and the rise on the other hand of a populist, nativist and sometimes overtly fascist right. It is argued that these phenomena, reflecting the increasingly crisis-prone character of global capitalism, the growing gap between rich and poor and a generalized sense of insecurity, are rooted in the dismantling of socially embedded organizations through processes often described as 'financialization', driven by the taken-for-granted dominance of neoliberal ideology. The paper explores the rise to dominance of the neoliberal 'thought style' and its inherent logic in underpinning the dismantling and restructuring of capitalist organization. Its focus is upon transnational value chain capitalism which has rebalanced power relations in favour of a small elite that is able to operate and realize wealth in ways that defy and often succeed in escaping the regulation of nation states. Copyright © 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
... By requiring employees to organize workplace by workplace, US industrial relations law demands that unions organize new establishments at a high rate just to maintain their membership levels. Unions have largely failed to surmount this hurdle since the 1950s (Farber & Western, 2001), but the early 1980s witnessed a major collapse in the level of union organization (Farber & Western, 2002;Tope & Jacobs, 2009). Although there is some dispute over exactly when union organizing began to decline, the timing roughly coincides with employers' increased push into the political arena and the election of a Republican president who was notably hostile toward unions. ...
We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, contingent work, outsourcing, and performance pay as well as the success of social identity movements in shaping employment benefits. We address the role that organizations play as sites of conflict within and between stakeholder groups. We examine the reasons for changes to employment—in particular, how struggles among stakeholders have contributed to reorganizing employment relationships. We also examine how these changes have affected inequality by (i) influencing the distribution of rewards within organizations (via changes in the determination of pay and benefits and in the allocation of workers to jobs) and (ii) altering, on a macro level, how rewards are distributed among different stakeholders. This paper underscores the inconclusive nature of research on many important questions raised by changes in employment relations, and it identifies areas in which future work is urgently needed.
... Public policies have a major impact on the level of unionization of the public sector (Gregory & Borland, 1999;Farber & Western, 2002;Freeman & Valletta, 1988). As Freeman (1986) puts it, "in [US] states with laws favorable to unionism, public sector unionism has flourished; in states without such laws, it has not" (p. ...
This paper develops a majority voting model with endogenous public sector unionism. Agents vote on the public sector's right to strike, here modeled as an exogenous boost in wages, and then on taxation to fund the provision of some public good. It is found that a majority votes in favour of a public right to strike if and only if the changed voting behaviour of public sector workers boosts government output despite increased labour costs to the government.
... Nessa questão, há muita convergência: o declínio dos sindicatos tem sido associado ao crescimento da desigualdade de renda (Chaykowsky e Slotsve, 2002). Para muitos autores, como Charlwood (2002) (Farber e Western, 2002), à menor pressão social sobre os jovens para se filiar aos sindicatos (Visser, 2002), ao aumento do comércio internacional (Kuruvilla et al., 2002), à sofisticação da gestão de recursos humanos nas empresas e ao aumento da proteção oferecida pela legislação trabalhista (Gomez, Gunderson e Meltz, 2002). Há autores que associam a presente situação a deficiências dos próprios sindicatos. ...
... By requiring employees to organize workplace by workplace, US industrial relations law demands that unions organize new establishments at a high rate just to maintain their membership levels. Unions have largely failed to surmount this hurdle since the 1950s (Farber & Western, 2001), but the early 1980s witnessed a major collapse in the level of union organization (Farber & Western, 2002; Tope & Jacobs, 2009). Although there is some dispute over exactly when union organizing began to decline, the timing roughly coincides with employers' increased push into the political arena and the election of a Republican president who was notably hostile toward unions. ...
We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships, focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, contingent work, outsourcing, and performance pay as well as the success of social identity movements in shaping employment benefits. In doing so, we address the role of organizations as sites of conflict within and between stakeholder groups, examining how struggles among stakeholders have contributed to reorganizing employment relationships. We also examine how these changes have affected inequality by (i) influencing the distribution of rewards within organizations (via changes in the determination of pay and benefits and in the allocation of workers to jobs) and (ii) altering, on a macro level, how rewards are distributed among different stakeholders. In closing, we identify areas where future work is urgently needed.
... Right party governments often revise and abolish regulations that protect workers (Freeman & Medoff, 1984;Howell, 1995;King & Wood, 1999). In the context of right party control of government, it is more difficult for workers to form unions and recruit union members (Farber & Western, 2002;Western, 1997). For example, Brady and Wallace (2000) show that the partisan composition of state governments has a substantial effect on U.S. unionization. ...
Much social science suggests that income inequality is a product of economic and demographic factors and recent work highlights the influence of Leftist politics in affluent Western democracies. But, prior research has neglected rightist politics. We examine the impact of cumulative right party power on three measures of income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 16 affluent Western democracies from 1969 to 2000. We find that cumulative right party power significantly increases inequality with effects comparable to other established causes. Left party power has less influence than the right on the Gini coefficient and the 90/50 ratio but a larger influence on the 90/10 ratio. Union density is insignificant after controlling for right party power. Right party power partly channels through and partly combines with government expenditures to affect inequality. Temporal interactions show that right parties became more influential after 1989 while left parties became less effective. Supplementary analyses suggest that a component of right party power's effects occurs through labor market inequality prior to taxes and transfers. Sensitivity analyses reveal that the results are robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications and operationalizations and do not depend on the inclusion of the U.S. in the sample. Our results inform debates about the sources of inequality and related sociological theories regarding class, politics, the state and the economy.
... Some examples where unions have played a pivotal role in democratization Some examples where unions have played a pivotal role in democratization range from the "fi rst wave of democratization" in Europe prior to World War I (Eley range from the "fi rst wave of democratization" in Europe prior to World War I (Eley 2002) through the battle of Solidarity against the communist regime in Poland, to 2002) through the battle of Solidarity against the communist regime in Poland, to the fi ght against the apartheid regime in South Africa by the Congress of South the fi ght against the apartheid regime in South Africa by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). One of the clearest recent cases is the formation African Trade Unions (COSATU). ...
The standard approach to policy-making and advice in economics implicitly or explicitly ignores politics and political economy, and maintains that if possible, any market failure should be rapidly removed. This essay explains why this conclusion may be incorrect; because it ignores politics, this approach is oblivious to the impact of the removal of market failures on future political equilibria and economic efficiency, which can be deleterious. We first outline a simple framework for the study of the impact of current economic policies on future political equilibria and indirectly on future economic outcomes. We then illustrate the mechanisms through which such impacts might operate using a series of examples. The main message is that sound economic policy should be based on a careful analysis of political economy and should factor in its influence on future political equilibria.
... Right party governments typically revise and abolish regulations that protect workers (Freeman & Medoff, 1984;King & Wood, 1999). In the context of right party control of government, it is more difficult for workers to form unions, recruit union members, and win unionization elections (Brady & Wallace, 2000;Farber & Western, 2002). ...
This study assesses three explanations for cross-national differences in unionization: Western’s (1997) institutional model, economic explanations based on the business cycle or globalization, and Hechter’s (2004) solidaristic theory. This study features a multilevel analysis of employed workers with the late 1990s World Values surveys of 18 affluent democracies. The analyses generally support the institutional model. Left parties and ghent systems remain influential, though ghent is less robust. Neo-corporatism and wage coordination are insignificant whereas workplace access is the more salient indicator of centralization. Beyond Western’s model, right cabinet significantly weakens unionization. Refuting economic explanations, inflation, unemployment, and economic growth, as well as international trade and investment, do not influence unionization. Consistent with Hechter’s claims, the welfare state reduces unionization but, contradicting his claims, immigration does not undermine unions. Ultimately, this study supports a revised institutional model that supplements Western’s model with right cabinet and the welfare state.
... As Henry Farber and Bruce Western have cogently argued, however, a heavy emphasis on these overt initiatives is difficult to reconcile with a close examination of the timing and patterns of union decline. 83 Our own account would emphasize alternative policy mechanisms and focus on the consequences of government inaction rather than action. During the recent transformation of the American political economy, the evolution of industrial relations is perhaps the most consequential instance of policy drift. ...
The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (1) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality —namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change —one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests —fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all.
... The pattern of decline described in this article suggests that the immediate effect of legislative change may have been indirect, as the ECA exposed the weakness of those unions that lacked the resources and organizational strength in the workplace to cope with the rapid decentralization of bargaining in the absence of official sponsorship or employer support. This contrasts with the situation in the UK and the USA, where the impact of legal and political changes depended on parallel economic changes to bring about union decline (Charlwood, 2005;Farber and Western, 2002). ...
This article uses individual-level data from the New Zealand Election Study surveys to analyse trade union membership decline between 1990 and 2002. The abrupt decline in union density during the first two-and-a-half years of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 was concentrated almost entirely in the private and mixed/non-profit sectors, and was sharpest among workers in the secondary labour market. Across 1990—2002, compositional change (i.e. change in the structure of the economy and workforce) and attitudinal change, as captured in our analysis, had little impact on union density decline. Most of the decline in density explained in this analysis can be attributed to within-group behavioural change. A number of explanations are discussed. The findings are consistent with the thesis that the sharp decline in union membership under the Employment Contracts Act 1991 was largely due to receding union reach, resulting in the current unfulfilled demand for union membership reported elsewhere.
Uno de los vocablos más utilizados en las ciencias sociales es el de neoliberalismo. La mención de este concepto parece usarse indiscriminadamente en distintos ámbitos, sin referir a algo preciso o, más bien, soslayando un cúmulo de significados que tal palabra puede ofrecernos, cayendo en lugares comunes que lo señalan como algo peyorativo, sin siquiera enunciar sus propidades. En este trabajo, se pretende esbozar una definición mínima de esta noción que sea fructífera para su empleo en diversas disciplinas, intentando enriquecer diversas discusiones iniciadas por distintos académicos. Para eso se exploró la historia de este concepto, la vaguedad en la que suele caer, los diferentes desarrollos que han desarrollado distintos teóricos, y los casos hist´óricos que permiten historizar a esta noción para hacerla operativa. Los escenarios utilizados fueron los de Chile durante el gobierno de Pinochet (1973-1990), Estados Unidos bajo la administración de Ronald Reagan (1981-1990) y el Reino Unido contemplando el mandato de Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990). Sin embargo, más allá de focalizarse en políticas específicas, se analiza al neoliberalismo como parte de un cambio en los modos de producción que tiene su origen en lo que algunos teóricos denominaron como globalización o, con más rigor, toyotismo o sociedad posindustrial.
Why has private sector union participation fallen away so much in the United States since the late 1950s? Featuring an improved dataset on National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections, I present evidence that import penetration accounts for approximately 40 percent of the decline in union formation for U.S. manufacturing. This estimate translates to 4.6 percent of the decline in private sector union density. The effect is driven by trade with low-income countries and, to some extent, other high-income countries. China is not a factor early on, but their strong import growth since 2000 can account for about 12 percentage points of the total decline.
This study uses newly disaggregated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election data to revisit the theory that sectoral and regional shifts in economic activity contributed substantially to private-sector union decline in the United States. Unlike most studies, which focus on differential employment growth among union and non-union establishments, this article focuses on how such shifts may have affected organizational rates themselves. Improved data permit a shift-share decomposition that indicates that approximately 40% of the decline in union elections is in response to sectoral shifts, the majority attributable to changes within each sector. Moreover, in an update to Dickens and Leonard’s 1985 study, the author shows that declining organization rates since 1980 are responsible for a decline in union density of 5.4 percentage points.
This study examines trade union decline in light of concurrent changes in the demographic and sectoral composition of labor markets. Drawing on classical sociology and contemporary scholarship on work and employment, the author theorizes that the emergence of post-industrial work settings coupled with more socially diverse workforces make labor organizing more difficult than prior research recognizes. Operating through various mechanisms, these factors are thought to hinder the development of solidarity among workers and direct employment growth toward previously unorganized parts of the economy. Using panel data on 18 countries from 1960 to 2015, these ideas are tested with regression models that capture labor market changes indicative of post-industrial capitalism—measured by changes in deindustrialization, foreign-born population, and female share of employment. The results support the theoretical argument, with counterfactual estimates suggesting that labor market changes occurring between 1960 and 2015 reduced union density by 9 to 13 points for the whole sample.
This article uses Denise Giardina’s 1987 novel, Storming Heaven, as a case study to look at how labor is represented aesthetically in fiction for political ends. The narrative depicts the theft of an Appalachian pastoral scene, which quickly devolves into mine work, abuse, and death. Mine labor is described vividly, and it is performed under the steady eye of mine guards who use threats, intimidation, and weapons to quash strikes, kill strikers, and keep miners working and living in fear. Giardina’s novel is a political novel that challenges unfair working conditions and neoliberal exploitation. She uses her work to create a sense of exhaustion through aesthetic and narrative choices. Exhaustion, with its resonances of hard work and honest labor, helps Giardina shift the Southern Appalachian structures of feeling from past political and social loss toward an alignment of political activism and futurity. Excerpts from reviews of the novel show how readers process their sense of exhaustion and the novel’s political aims. Giardina’s style is effective for getting readers to sympathize with her labor politics by using a familiar, anti-cathartic staying-power, although this style seems to lack a sense of sustainability and risks making readers feel manipulated or politically fatigued.
This article investigates whether unions have power to influence turnover of poorly performing chief executive officers (CEOs). Employing the transparency coalition framework, we develop hypotheses regarding CEO tenure given unionization, performance‐turnover sensitivity, and firm performance following CEO turnover. We use Cox regression and a data set of US firms from 1993 to 2013 to show that CEO turnover is accelerated at firms that unionize. Discontinuity analysis suggests that the relationship is causal. Overall, the results show the significance of unions in the key corporate governance event of CEO turnover and suggest that, though they may proceed independently and for their own traditional goals of good pay and job conditions for their members, unions can be allies of investors and boards or directors when it comes to removing underperforming CEOs.
Drawing on transaction costs economics and longitudinal data on Danish corporations, we analyse the distribution of board‐level employee representation (BLER) and the characteristics of employee directors in a context where workers have the possibility (but not also an obligation) to nominate representatives to the board of directors. We show that BLER is less likely instituted in firms with CEO or family‐related members on the board, but more likely observed in larger, older firms and in those with high firm‐specific human capital and union density. Firm‐specific human capital, qualifications and union membership also determine individual worker's probability to become a board member.
The standard approach to policy making and advice in economics implicitly or explicitly ignores politics and political economy and maintains that if possible, any market failure should be rapidly removed. This essay explains why this conclusion may be incorrect; because it ignores politics, this approach is oblivious to the impact of the removal of market failures on future political equilibria and economic efficiency, which can be deleterious. We first outline a simple framework for the study of the impact of current economic policies on future political equilibria — and indirectly on future economic outcomes. We then illustrate the mechanisms through which such impacts might operate using a series of examples. The main message is that sound economic policy should be based on a careful analysis of political economy and should factor in its influence on future political equilibria.
Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada - by Barry Eidlin May 2018
We examine the potential of labor-relations reforms to address wage inequality by relating an index of the favorableness to unions of Canadian provincial labor-relations laws to changes in industry, occupation, education, and gender-specific provincial unionization rates. While we find some evidence of larger unionization gains among high-school–educated workers, the differences across groups are small and in some cases suggest larger gains among professionals. Overall, the results suggest a limited potential for reforms in labor-relations laws to mitigate growing labor-market inequality.
To examine whether and how social movements that target private firms are influenced by larger protest cycles, we theorize about osmotic mobilization—social movement spillover that crosses the boundary of the firm—and how it should vary with the ideological overlap of the relevant actors and the opportunity structure that potential activists face inside the firm. We test our hypotheses by examining the relationship between levels of protest in U.S. cities around issues like Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement and subsequent support for labor-union organizing in those cities. Combining nationally representative data on more than 20,000 protest events from 1960 to 1995 with data on more than 150,000 union organizing drives held from 1965 to 1999, we find that greater levels of protest activity are associated with greater union support, that spillover accrued disproportionately to unions with more progressive track records on issues like Civil Rights, and that these effects were disproportionately large in the wake of mobilization around employment-related causes and shrank in the wake of conservative political reaction that limited room for maneuver among the external protesters, the labor movement, or both. Our research helps to specify the channels through which external pressures affect firm outcomes.
This chapter maps existing patterns of broad-based worker ownership and control in contemporary advanced capitalism and considers future possibilities for expanding democracy within firms. Section one discusses worker ownership and control arrangements in relation to different theories of the firm and shows how these arrangements map onto different national systems. Section two compares Germany, which is characterized by worker control without ownership, and the United States, which is marked by worker ownership without control. Section three explores three pathways through which broad-based worker ownership and control might be deepened and more strongly coupled in the future.
This article examines the decline of unions in the United States from 1980 to 2015, using the unionization rate as the main indicator to measure how much of the employed work force is unionized. The analytical framework used classifies the most important factors of this decline into the cyclical, the structural, and the political-institutional. In addition, the author contrasts the U.S. trends in union density with those of other developed countries, noting an important divergence. The decline in the U.S. was determined more by the institutions that regulate the labor system than by economic globalization.
Trade unions have occupied a central place in industrial relations research since the beginning of this field of study. With the well-documented decline in union membership that occurred around the world in the latter half of the 20th century, research on this topic has taken on a tone of heightened concern and urgency. Once again, fundamental questions about the role of unions as institutions in the labour market and society are being raised. Are unions outmoded institutions that arose out of the industrial revolution and grew to prominence and power in response to the economic and social conditions of the industrial economies of the 20th century but ill-suited to the economies, societies, and workers of today? Or, is the decline in unions likely to be reversed in the near term? If so, how? And, perhaps more fundamentally, if so, will the unions of the future be mirror images of those of the past and will the processes by which unions reverse their declines mirror the organising models and histories of the past? Or will the organising processes and organisational forms, strategies and roles of unions also change in significant ways? Finally, what is at stake in these debates? That is, should others outside the labour movement care whether or not unions rebuild their membership and regain their lost power and status as labour market institutions?
Union membership confers certain benefits to workers. Some of these benefits, like the union wage premium, are visible to both members and non-members alike. Most others, such as the enforcement of procedural justice or the establishment of family friendly practices, are hard to identify before entering the labour market and near impossible if one has never sampled union membership (Fernie and Gray, 2002). It is only when a worker has actually been employed in a unionised environment for a long enough duration, or, when a worker has access to reliable information about the nature of unionisation, that s/he can form an accurate opinion about the value of membership (i.e., whether the benefits of joining a union outweigh any of the potential costs). If workers never experience any of these hard-to-observe benefits, they may be less inclined to become active dues paying members where unions are present, and even less likely to actively organise in workplaces lacking any union presence. This is especially the case if, as recent British and American research suggests, the largest and most visible benefit (i.e. the wage advantage conferred to unionised workers) has largely disappeared (Blanchflower and Bryson, 2003).
I argue that the extension of collective bargaining rights and formation of public sector labor unions requires the prior existence of these rights among significant sections of the private sector economy. The secular decline in private sector unionization will undermine the political bases of support for public sector unions. I demonstrate that public sector unionism emerged where private sector unions were initially strong. Declining private sector unionism has led to a marked decrease in support for public sector unions. The diminution of their allies in the private sector and the prospect of extended periods of austerity at the state and local level have put public sector unions in a precarious position that Republican governors and legislatures are taking full advantage of. The prospects for renewal in the labor movement are dim.
Why did public sector unionization rise so dramatically and then plateau at the same time as private sector unionization underwent a precipitous decline? The exclusion of public sector employees from the centerpiece of private sector labor law—the 1935 Wagner Act—divided U.S. labor law and relegated public sector demand-making to the states. Consequently, public sector employees' collective bargaining rights were slow to develop and remain geographically concentrated, unequal and vulnerable. Further, divided labor law put the two movements out of alignment; private sector union density peaked nearly a decade before the first major statutes granting public sector collective bargaining rights passed. As a result of this incongruent timing and sequencing, the United States has never had a strong union movement comprised of both sectors at the height of their membership and influence.
Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system.The Unheavenly Chorusis the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering. The Unheavenly Chorusis the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more. In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice.The Unheavenly Chorusreveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.
In the 1980s, the layoff policy of large US companies changed from temporary suspension of employment to permanent termination.
Previous studies have examined how powerful shareholders and shareholder-value-oriented managers promoted this change, but
they have failed to capture the fuller extent of the underlying inter-class power dynamics, overlooking how labour contested
the change. Building on models of both temporary and permanent layoff announcements made by 679 large US companies from 1984
to 2006, this article examines labour unions' resistance to the shift from temporary to permanent layoffs. Results suggest
that labour unions resisted the shift, both by bargaining with firms for more reliance on temporary layoffs, when workforce
adjustment was unavoidable, and by discouraging firms from making permanent layoffs through direct confrontation. The results
further suggest that the hostile political environment in the 1980s and the early 1990s significantly undermined unions' ability
to maintain temporary layoffs, contributing to the shift.
It is well known that the organizing environment for labor unions in the United States has deteriorated dramatically over a long period of time, a situation that has contributed to the sharp decline in the private-sector union membership rate and resulted in many fewer representation elections. What is leß well known is that since the late 1990s, average turnout in the representation elections that are held has dropped substantially. These facts are related. The author develops a model of how unions select targets for organizing through the NLRB election proceß that clearly implies that a deteriorating organizing environment will lead to systematic change in the composition of elections held. The model implies that a deteriorating environment will lead unions not only to contest fewer elections but also to focus on larger potential bargaining units and on elections where they have a larger probability of winning. A standard rational-voter model implies that these changes in composition will lead to lower turnout. The author investigates the implications of these models empirically, using data on turnout in more than 140,000 NLRB certification elections held between 1973 and 2009. The results are consistent with the model and suggest that changes in composition account for about one-fifth of the decline in turnout between 1999 and 2009.
The article briefly presents Manufacturing Consent, a 1979 publication directed by Allis Chalmer that deals with the way in which work discipline for manual labourers is organised through coercion and consent, based in particular on the establishment of production quota creating a kind of "game of making out" between works. The author reviews the ethnographic method that had been used at the time. He criticises this approach and suggests a replacement based on an "extended case method" that incorporates the work context and includes actors' trajectories as well as transformations in markets and the role of the state - without forgetting spatial-temporal factors of change. This becomes an opportunity for the author to review recent publications that have expanded the object of research to include gender, domestic labour, migrant workers, services, trade unions, etc. The article suggests that issues pertaining to the battles witnessed in these domains range from exploitation to commodification and include consumerism. All of these bones of contention have inaugurated a new era of transnational mobilisation extending from Eastern Europe to Asia and inspiring the author to reproduce Polanyi’s Great Transformation thesis, after updating it to include the recent advent of a third, ultra-liberal wave that broadens commodification to include nature (earth, water and air) and knowledge. The first manifestation of this change is the Occupy movement.
This study analyzes U.S. union organizing activity and membership growth from 1990 to 2004, a period in which an overall pattern of union decline continued and in which organizing achieved renewed prominence as both a union policy and public policy issue. Models for organizing activity and membership growth were proposed and tested. Union decentralization and employer opposition were found to be key predictors of organizing activity differences among unions. These same factors, along with organizing activity, helped explain union differences in membership growth, as did a “Sweeney era” effect.
Despite the close political regulation of union recognition disputes, sociologists have paid little attention to recent political determinants of success in these contests. A state-centered political-opportunity approach suggests that if conservative political officials can reduce the number of union recognition elections, union organization will be blocked. Partly because many labor scholars claim there was a postwar departure in labor movement fortunes, we attempt to detect and model a contingent break in the relationship between Republican control of the presidency and these elections using interactive specifications. Our findings show that shortly after the conservative, anti-union Reagan administration took office, recognition elections, and union victories in these elections, fell sharply. With macroeconomic and other determinants held constant, other political conditions with explanatory power include congressional oversight committee ideology and conservative appointments to the key regulatory agency. Our findings support political accounts and also suggest that unions' failures to organize new workplaces were sustained by subsequent conservative administrations.
An augmented Phillips curve model is employed to evaluate the hypothesis that the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike of 1981 marked the beginning of a structural change in U.S. labor relations, which increased the relative bargaining power of management. After controlling for other factors which influence union wages, the resulting estimates indicate that union wage growth rates, average wages, and total union wage payments were significantly retarded by a structural shift which originated concurrently with the 1981 replacement of striking PATCO members by the federal government.
In a sequel to an article published in a recent issue of the Review, Professor Weiler continues his exploration of whether and how the NLRA has contributed to the decline of unionism in private sector employment. His focus here is on the challenge faced by a newly certified union trying to negotiate a first collective agreement in a legal regime founded on the principle of freedom of contract. Professor Weiler accepts free collective bargaining as the appropriate manner in which to organize labor-management relations. From that premise, he argues that the major flaw in the current system is that the law gives newly organized workers both too much and, at the same time, too little freedom of contact. Professor Weiler concludes by recommending several reforms in the law governing the economic weapons available to management and unions during a labor dispute.
The persistent decline in union membership in the United States is to a considerable extent attributable to the stubborn and often coercive resistance by employers that is fostered by the representation process under the NLRA. In this Article, Professor Weiler argues that the traditional response of labor law reformers - calling for improvement of the regulatory framework through the provision of speedier and stiffer sanctions - is simply incapable of stemming the rise in antiunion activities by employers. He contends that the initial promise of the NLRA can be redeemed only by elimination of the protracted representation campaign through a system of "instant elections" modeled on the Canadian labor law regime.
The claim that institutions “matter” is a subject of lively debate in the study of politics today. It is also something of a nonissue that is not really being debated at all. The reason it can be both at once is that the claim is loaded with theoretical baggage. If it is taken to mean that the actions of politicians or bureaucrats are in fundamental respects autonomous of social interests, the statement can easily prove controversial. If it is taken to mean that institutional context shapes the decisions of political actors, or that the relation between social interests and political outcomes varies with the institutional setting, then there is not much to debate; for there has long been a virtual consensus among students of politics that institutions do matter in these general respects.
Using NLRB cases reporting hiring of striker replacements, I provide a longitudinal analysis of 165 strikes from 1935–1990.
Strikes since 1981 most closely resembled strikes occurring from 1938–1947: They lasted longer and involved more strikers
and more replacements than strikes in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Interestingly, NLRB disposition of employer unfair labor
practice charges remained fairly constant throughout the 55 years analyzed and overwhelmingly favored unions. Although my
findings are preliminary, they suggest that more empirical analysis of replacement strikes is warranted. I also suggest how
some existing strike models can be readily adapted to explain replacement strike phenomena.
Michael Goldfield challenges standard explanations for union decline, arguing that the major causes are to be found in the changing relations between classes. Goldfield combines innovative use of National Labor Relations Board certification election data, which serve as an accurate measure of new union growth in the private sector, with a sophisticated analysis of the standard explanations of union decline. By understanding the decline of U.S. labor unions, he maintains, it is possible to begin to understand the conditions necessary for their future rebirth and resurgence.
After documenting the long decline in private sector unionism over the last 50 years, we present an accounting framework that decomposes the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate into components due to (1) differential growth rates in employment between the union and nonunion sectors and (2) changes in the union new organization rate (through NLRB-supervised representation elections). We find that most of the decline in the union membership rate is due to differential employment growth rates and that changes in union organizing activity had relatively little effect. Given that the differential employment growth rates are due largely to broader market and regulatory forces, we conclude that the prospects are dim for a reversal of the downward spiral of labor unions based on increased organizing activity.
The author documents four facts regarding the pattern of NLRB-supervised representation election activity over the period 1952-98: (1) election activity fell sharply and discontinuously beginning in the mid-1970s, after increasing for two decades; (2) unions' election win rate declined less sharply, though continuously, over the entire period; (3) a 'size gap' characterized unions' win rate throughout the period, with a lower win rate in large units than in small ones; and (4) the size gap widened substantially between 1958 and 1998. A simple optimizing model of the union decision to hold a representation election can explain the first three facts. The author describes two possible explanations for the fourth fact, one based on differing behavior by employers in different size classes, and one purely statistical. Results of empirical tests using NLRB election data for 1952-98 suggest that those two explanations together can largely account for the observed patterns. (Author's abstract.)
This study examines why unions, after winning certification rights, fail to secure agreements in roughly one of every four first-contract negotiations. Hypotheses are derived from Chamberlain's theory that the relative power of the negotiating parties is a function of the costs of agreeing and disagreeing, costs that are shaped by economic, legal, and organizational factors. The author analyzes data through 1982 on 118 cases in which unions had won NLRB elections in Indiana in the years 1979 and 1980. He finds that an employer's discrimination against union activists and his refusal to bargain, measured by section 8(a)(3) and 8(a)(5) charges deemed meritorious by the regional office of the NLRB, have substantial negative effects on the probability that a first contract will be reached. Similarly, negative effects result from lengthy delay in the NLRB's resolution of employer objections and challenges to lost elections. On the other hand, unions are also more likely to obtain first contracts when firms pay wages well above the industry average, when national union representatives participate in negotiations, and when bargaining units are relatively large and cohesive. (Abstract courtesy JSTOR.)
Recent studies have challenged the conclusion Getman, Goldberg, and Herman reached in their 1976 study that company campaigns have little if any effect on how workers vote in union certification elections. This study attempts to reconcile these conflicting results by re-analyzing data collected by Getman, Goldberg, and Herman for their study. The author estimates a probit model of voting that controls for several variables not considered in other studies. He finds that employer threats and actions taken against union supporters, some written communications, and captive-audience speeches all have statistically significant effects on voting. Election simulations based on the voting model also show that the effects of these employer tactics can be important in determining election outcomes. (Abstract courtesy JSTOR.)
This study analyzes determinants of union election outcomes at the level of the work unit. Within a theoretical framework of utility maximization, voting behavior is modeled as a function of the social psychology of groups, the economic and sociopolitical environment, NLRB procedures, and the extent of union organization of the industry. Utilizing NLRB certification-election records for 1979, the author finds a negative relationship between unit size and union victories in units of fewer than 65 workers, but no relationship in larger units. Also negatively related to union victories are delays between petition and election dates, elections held in southern states having right-to-work laws, and elections involving the Teamsters. In contrast, workers are more likely to vote for representation as unemployment levels and the proportion of consent elections rise and as the rate of unionization in their industry rises to 35 percent. (Abstract courtesy JSTOR.)
The institutional structure of the American labor market changed remarkably from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s. In the '50s and '60s trade unions seemed permanently established in the private sector of the economy: a third of nonagricultur al wage and salary workers and over half of blue-collar workers were union members; hundreds of thousands of workers voted annually in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections to join unions; most large firms sought stable collective bargaining relations with their unions. By contrast, in the public sector only 10–12 percent of workers were union members; fewer were covered by collective bargaining contracts; and most experts regarded public employees as intrinsically nonorganizable. According to AFL-CIO president George Meany, it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government" (Kramer, 1962, p. 14). The massive contraction of unionism in the private sector and expansion in the public sector in the 1970s and 1980s (see Exhibit 1) has produced an utterly different situation today. In the private sector, the proportion of wage and salary workers in unions plummeted to 14 percent in 1986—a level comparable to that in the Great Depression; only a minuscule number of workers joined unions through NLRB elections; and national companies openly proclaimed their intent to establish a "union-free environment." By contrast, in the public sector over a third of the work force was unionized; some 40 percent were covered by collective contracts;1 and 1 Estimates of organization in the public sector differ somewhat among sources, though all data show greater organization than in the private sector. See Freeman, Ichniowski, and Zax (forthcoming) for a detailed analysis of the various statistics.
The Federal Government as Employer: The Federal Labor Relations Authority and the PATCO Challenge. Labor Rela-tions and Public Policy Series, no. 32. Philadelphia: Wharton School
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Northrup, H. R. and Thornton, A. D. (1988). The Federal Government as Employer: The Federal Labor Relations Authority and the PATCO Challenge. Labor Rela-tions and Public Policy Series, no. 32. Philadelphia: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
The longest season: union organizing in the last decade, a/k/a How come one team has to play with its shoelaces tied together
- R Prosten
Prosten, R. (1978). 'The longest season: union organizing in the last decade, a/k/a How come one team has to play with its shoelaces tied together?' Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association.
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Governing the Workplace
—— (1990). Governing the Workplace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.