Abstract
In many ways, Jake Rosenfeld’s What Unions No Longer Do is an update on the answer to the question of Freeman and Medoff’s seminal work What Do Unions Do? (1984) written three decades earlier. Rosenfeld’s book draws together themes from his own work in this area, supplemented by much original research. It portrays unions as a rapidly fading force for social equality and justice in contemporary America. Beginning with an analysis of public sector unionism, a natural starting point given the dominance of the public sector in the contemporary American labour movement, Rosenfeld demonstrates that the union wage premium is actually much lower in the public sector than the private sector. He outlines worrying trends in labour regulation for the strength of public sector unions: for example, many states are making public sector collective bargaining increasingly difficult. Together with stagnant public sector job growth, Rosenfeld argues that public sector unionism is an unlikely candidate for serious union revival, or indeed as a vehicle for stemming stark inequality trends. He estimates that if public sector density increased by a third, this would increase overall union density by a mere 2 percentage points (pp. 43–44).
When examining the private sector (Chapter 2), Rosenfeld focuses, rather interestingly, on the spillover effect of unions on raising the wages of non-members, as well as members. While the private sector union wage premium remains strong, the spillover effect to non-members, through threat effects and the setting of within-industry pay norms, has all but vanished, implying that unions’ influence on wages no longer extends beyond their own membership base. This is a key insight, because ignoring union spillover effects understates the role of declining unionization in growing inequality. Moreover, the prospect of unions as a force for greater equality is waning via another route: that is, growing inequality among the unionized. Rosenfeld reaches similar conclusions about unions as a waning force for racial equality when examining racial wage gaps (Chapter 5). He demonstrates that the declining number of union jobs in the private sector is a key reason for the growing black-white wage gap, although blacks still benefit from a union wage premium and are more likely to join unions.
Rosenfeld demonstrates that unions’ mobilizing capacity within and outside the workplace is also in serious decline. Global competition and the increasing willingness of employers in the private sector to substitute unionized with non-unionized labour during disputes, coupled with tougher strike regulations in the public sector, have made unions’ main weapon much weaker (Chapter 4). With respect to notable successes in organizing certain groups such as Hispanics and newer immigrant groups in the prominent ‘Justice for Janitors’ movement, Rosenfeld’s evidence suggests such cases really are the exception rather than the rule (Chapter 6). Whereas unions once held some clout at the ballot box too, Rosenfeld argues the changing composition of union members, from largely private sector and low-educated to largely public sector and highly educated, has reduced their influence on the representation of the least privileged groups at the ballot box (Chapter 7).
For those familiar with the plight of the American labour movement, most of the book’s main findings will come as no great surprise. The main conclusions are that unions no longer wield as powerful a ‘sword of justice’ as they once did and, in particular, the shift to public sector unionism and the general declining influence of unions over conditions for non-members means unions no longer confer as much benefit on the weakest sections of the labour market as they once did. Perhaps one glaring omission, relative to Freeman and Medoff’s classic, is the lack of analysis on the relationship between unionization and establishment performance. Unions still reduce inequalities, even if much less so. However, the question still remains – what are their business costs and benefits in this new landscape?
One feature that makes this book stand out as an accessible and detailed case study on the contemporary American labour movement is that Rosenfeld takes care to observe the variation in how organized labour has fared across States. For instance, the union wage premium is much larger in labour friendly states. Another is that Rosenfeld has carefully woven in a narrative with many illustrative media stories and anecdotes, making the content spring to life more vividly. For those interested in growing inequality and the fate of the labour movement in America, this book should be a set text. Whereas Freeman and Medoff concluded that unions were a surprisingly strong force for social equality in America, offering hope for the labour movement, Rosenfeld judiciously concludes three decades later that unions are no longer the force for social equality they once were and that the intervening union decline has been so severe that the prospect of any significant union revival is, rather soberingly, minimal.