UNIONS IN DECLINE? WHAT HAS CHANGED AND WHY

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511619793.011

10 - UNIONS IN DECLINE? WHAT HAS CHANGED AND WHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2010

Michael Wallerstein and

Edited by

Karl Ove Moene and

David Austen-Smith: Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Jeffry A. Frieden: Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Miriam A. Golden: Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Karl Ove Moene: Affiliation:
Universitetet i Oslo
Adam Przeworski: Affiliation:
New York University

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Summary

Introduction

Unions are in big trouble, as everyone knows. Under attack by conservative politicians, battered by overseas competition, threatened by capital flight, bewildered by changes in the nature of work, and shackled by an outmoded egalitarian ideology, unions increasingly appear like large but aging dinosaurs struggling to adapt as the climate changes. The proportion of workers who belong to unions is in decline. Centralized systems of wage-setting are breaking apart. Incentive pay schemes and profit-sharing arrangements subvert negotiated wage scales. Wage inequality is growing while the median wage stagnates. Past achievements are under attack as European governments blame “labor market rigidities,” i.e. the legal and contractual protections that current workers enjoy, for persistently high unemployment. Even the unions' traditional political allies, the social democratic and labor parties, are keeping their distance, having discovered that being too closely tied to the unions is a political liability.

As is usually the case, what everyone knows to be true is not completely wrong but not completely right either. In this paper, we aim to describe, as precisely as the data allow, what is and is not known about the changing terrain of industrial relations in advanced industrial societies in the postwar period. We survey the empirical research that seeks to explain cross-national and longitudinal variation in union organization and wage-setting procedures. We do not attempt to provide country-by-country descriptions.

Type: Chapter
Information: Selected Works of Michael Wallerstein
The Political Economy of Inequality, Unions, and Social Democracy
, pp. 212 - 238

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511619793.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2008

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10 - UNIONS IN DECLINE? WHAT HAS CHANGED AND WHY

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