Michael Wallerstein’s research while affiliated with University of New Haven and other places

Few features of economic, social, or political life in industrialized democracies differ as much as the relative size of the trade union movement. The current density of union membership in the labor force ranges over almost the entire spectrum from above 90% in Sweden to under 20% in the United States (Goldfield 1987, 16). The level of unionization varies far more than such other characteristics of the labor force as the sectoral distribution of workers, the share of wages in GNP, rates of unemployment, or even the size of the public sector. Unionization rates vary more than such other forms of popular mobilization as electoral turnout or the share of the vote received by parties bearing communist, socialist, social democratic, or labor labels. The economic effects of high levels of unionization are ambiguous. Unions that are large relative to the economy may simultaneously have more power in the labor market and more of an incentive to moderate their wage demands. A union that covers only a small fraction of an industry’s work force, for example, can gain wage increases partly at the expense of employment among nonunion members, provided that union members have specialized skills not readily available elsewhere. In contrast, an industrial union covering the entire work force would be concerned with employment in all job categories. Bigger unions are not necessarily more militant unions (Cameron 1984; Olson 1982, chap. 4).

A central claim of both Marxist and neoclassical political theory is that under capitalism all governments must respect and protect the essential claims of those who own the productive wealth of society. This is the theory of “structural dependence of the state on capital.” Using a formal model, the internal logic and the robustness of the theory is examined. We conclude that in a static sense the theory is false: virtually any distribution of consumption between wage earners and owners of capital is compatible with continual private investment once an appropriate set of taxes and transfers is in place. Yet the state may be structurally dependent in a dynamic sense. Policies that, once in place, redistribute income without reducing investment do reduce investment during the period in which they are anticipated but not yet implemented.

There is a widespread consensus among nonacademic observers that labor unions with large numbers of unemployed members have been central actors in political coalitions demanding protectionist trade policies since the mid-1970s in advanced industrial societies. Yet trade unions and unemployment are hardly mentioned in most theories of the politics of international trade. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the importance of unemployment as a determinant of protectionist demands that is consistent with optimizing behavior on the part of union members and firms. Models of labor negotiations derived from cooperative bargaining theory are used to illustrate why the material benefits of protection received by union members and their employers in protected industries increase when union members are unemployed, even when workers are risk neutral and capital is immobile.

The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of profit and capitalists to democratic institutions through which workers can effectively press claims for material gains. When these conditions hold and a compromise is in force, the role of the state consists in institutionalizing, coordinating, and enforcing the terms of a compromise that represents the preferences of workers as well as capitalists.

The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of profit and capitalists to democratic institutions through which workers can effectively press claims for material gains. When these conditions hold and a compromise is in force, the role of the state consists in institutionalizing, coordinating, and enforcing the terms of a compromise that represents the preferences of workers as well as capitalists.

The increase of tourist activity for many destinations and their increased mobility within host countries has implied a rise in tourism associated externalities with vehicle crashes being the most common cause of injury for tourists. Within the transport literature, the number and variations in the amount of accidents has been related to a large set of determining variables, including weather conditions, socio-economic characteristics, exposure, physical characteristics of the road and a variety of dummies which try to capture effects such as safety laws and seasonal variations. However, the presence of tourism has been neglected. Using the case study of the Balearic Islands, the present study estimates the role of tourism in determining the number of accidents on a daily context, using the set of variables suggested by the literature and incorporating a daily measure for the stock of tourists at a host destination. Results show how tourism can be associated to a significant amount of the accidents that take place in the Balearics.