Abstract
How do public employees win and lose their collective bargaining rights in the United States? This thorny, and often underrated, question underpins the dense and multidimensional book by Dominic D. Wells. Adopting a diachronic comparative perspective covering more than five decades (ending in 2013), the author pursues a large-scale, twofold aim. First, he identifies what factors led policymakers to extend collective bargaining rights to public personnel through duty-to-bargain laws across different US states. Second, he explores under what conditions public-sector unions shielded the acquired rights against anti-union legislative interventions.
The provoking title, From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging, unhappily bolstered by a not equally communicative cover, arouses the reader’s curiosity around a topic as crucial—especially in ages of public budgetary emergency—as it is poorly investigated in the scholarly debate, which is often overshadowed by or engulfed by analogous scholarships in the private sector. Public employees and their collective bargaining rights have traditionally represented powerful leverage in the hands of governments to control public spending, a crucial target in times of austerity and retrenchment. The issue could not be more timely and relevant amid a global pandemic crisis. Furthermore, public employment, in the advanced economies, has historically embodied the stronghold of the union membership, due to historical dynamics and structural peculiarities as recalled in FDR’s words that Wells evokes in the second chapter (pp. 24–25).
Wells’ ambitious answer to the two challenging questions relies on a mixed-method approach. He builds his contribution on a rigorous and grounded research design that effectively combines an event history analysis (EHA) at the state level of the factors driving decision-makers to adopt policies that reduced the obstacles to unionization in the public sector with an in-depth qualitative investigation of two case studies (Ohio and Wisconsin). The case studies are used to qualify what union strategies succeed in preserving the acquired rights in collective bargaining. A massive bulk of empirical material is investigated. The quantitative analysis roots on a broad span of quantitative data covering more than 50 years (from 1960 to 2013) and relating to a selected range of political, institutional, economic, and cultural intervening variables, including legislative professionalism, bureaucratic capacity, citizen ideology, union density, employer opposition, fiscal health, and geographical proximity (Chapters 3 and 4). The content analysis of approximately 50 original semi-structured interviews and 450 newspaper articles supports the qualitative sections, enabling the author to disentangle the processes implemented from the narrative strategies utilized within each of the case studies (Chapters 5 and 6). I found particularly interesting—and fascinating—the idea of reconstructing the narratives used by the stakeholders involved to shape the public’s understanding of public employee labor issues, a realm in which public opinion is not generally sympathetic, especially in “hard times.” The US perspective constitutes a unique test to compare policy diffusion and legislative innovation across distinct states within a common supranational institutional framework.
Overcoming the dominant narrative rooting on partisan politics, Wells successfully demonstrates that partisanship plays a different role in the expansion than in the retrenchment phases of public-sector collective bargaining rights, and he points out further factors that motivate states to adopt and restrict laws that strengthen the role of unions in collective bargaining. Specifically, partisanship is not a predictor of expansion policies, which diffuse through imitation and emulation, predicted by citizen ideology, geographic proximity, bureaucratic capacity, and fiscal health. Conversely, partisanship plays a role in retrenchment choices, in interplay with a set of additional institutional and agency-related factors: the fiscal health of the state, the defensive strategic stance displayed by the unions to prevent harmful impacts on the members, and the capacity to build and leverage on unified coalition. In the end, Wells offers an informed and needed road map for where public-sector trade unions and practitioners should be heading to make gains in public policy and to protect their collective bargaining rights, as well as a baseline text for scholars in the field of employment relations in the public sector.
I highly recommend this engaging account, but I am compelled to also offer a few caveats. First, the actual target of the labor law battles and coalition campaigns—public employment—lacks a clear-cut boundary and an instructive definition. The author generally refers throughout the seven chapters to sectorial categories or professional groups of public employees—the teachers, the police, the firefighters, the local employees—neglecting to disambiguate the object under investigation. A precise definition of their professionalisms and job profiles as well as their sectors of occupation might have enriched the analysis in terms of clarity and completeness, but, perhaps more important, a detailed quantification of the workers potentially subject to collective bargaining rights would have added value for the whole reflection. Such aspects are even more significant in light of the differentiated outcomes emerging in the two case studies, in which two categories of public employees were at stake, specifically police officers and firefighters (included in Ohio and not in Wisconsin).
Second, the empirical findings elucidated by the author, overall, benefit from the interplay between the institutional dimensions mediating the policymaking processes and the agency of the actors involved, with the former offering ad hoc constraints and opportunities to the strategic actions that drove the latter. Nonetheless, such interchange from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective suffers from a limited focus, often hasty, which conversely could strengthen the main results of the book. To exemplify, one of the blurry findings emerging in this respect: Is it actually the configuration of partisanship and coalition-building playing a different role in the two phases of expansion and restriction of collective bargaining rights in the two case studies? Or might the interplay between partisanship and the Great Recession that busted in between the two phases have mediated the dissimilar outcomes? The interrelations are not adequately considered.
A final limitation of the book is the temporal development of the empirical investigation. Public employees win their collective bargaining rights before the 2008–09 financial crisis and lose them in the aftermath. Analogous developments occurred in the European public sectors, where restrictions or freezing to collective bargaining rights were inflicted on the personnel within the wider austerity manifestos to contain public debt. Yet Wells concludes that restricting collective bargaining rights in the public sector is not necessary to control state and local budget deficits. This conclusion, which is interestingly counterintuitive, is not fully convincing given that the actual impact of these policies on public-sector wages, and accordingly on state budgetary levels, is out of the scope of the analysis, as clarified by Wells. Nevertheless, a quantitative evaluation of the economic effort for public finances ensuing the expansion of collective bargaining rights and its path-dependent repercussions—in terms of personnel labor cost—would have reinforced the results.