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Labor and American Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2010

Paul Frymer
Paul Frymer
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The State of Working America, 2008/2009. By Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz. An Economic Policy Institute Book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 461 p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 609 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2010

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References

Notes

1 Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 111. Original emphasis.

2 Dahl, Preface to Economic Democracy, 4.

3 See, e.g., John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1980); J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1969); Robert E. Lane, “From Political to Industrial Democracy,” Polity 17 (no. 4, 1985), 623–48; Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

4 See, e.g., Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Guilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, “Oligarchy in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 7 (2009): 731–51.

5 Task Force on Inequality in American Democracy, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 2004). A number of recent APSA Kammerer book awards have focused specifically on inequality in the current age. See, e.g., Bartels, Unequal Democracy; Dara Z. Strolovitch, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber Boydstun, The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe versus Liberal America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). See, too, the recent compilations by Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (New York: Russell Sage, 2005); and Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler, eds., Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (New York: Russell Sage, 2008).

6 See, e.g., Henry S. Farber and Bruce Western, “Accounting for the Decline of Unions in the Private Sector, 1973–1998,” Journal of Labor Research 22 (2001): 459–85; Richard Barry Freeman and Joel Rogers, What Workers Want (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Daniel Tope and David Jacobs, “The Politics of Union Decline: The Contingent Determinants of Union Recognition Elections and Victories,” American Sociological Review 74 (October, 2009): 842–64.

7 See, e.g., Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness.

8 Jill Andresky Fraser, White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Reward in Corporate America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 188.

9 Bartels, Unequal Democracy. See, too, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

10 For different compilations of these statistics, see Dan Clawson and Mary Ann Clawson, “What Has Happened to the U.S. Labor Movement? Union Decline and Renewal,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999); Leo Troy, “The Rise and Fall of American Trade Unions: The Labor Movement from FDR to RR,” in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1986). The most recent statistics are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release,” http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm (January 22, 2010). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that public sector workers remain unionized at significantly higher rates—37.4% in 2009.

11 Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab2.htm.

12 Henry S. Farber, “Nonunion Wage Rates and the Threat of Unionization,” Industrial Relations Review 58 (2005): 335–52.

13 Richard B. Freeman, “How Much Has De-Unionization Contributed to Male Earnings Inequality.” In Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk, eds., Uneven Tides: Rising Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993).

14 Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, “Unions, Norms and the Rise in American Earnings Inequality,” working paper, November 2009.

15 See, e.g., John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002).

16 Regarding some of the monumental victories that came from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, see Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

17 See, Sarah L. Staszak, “The Politics of Judicial Retrenchment,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2009, Chapter 3.

18 See, e.g., Kate Bronfenbrenner, “Employer Behavior in Certification Elections and First Contracts Campaigns: Implications for Labor Law Reform,” in S. Friedman et al., Restoring the Promise of Labor Law (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2004); Richard B. Freeman and Morris M. Kleiner, “Employer Behavior in the Face of Union Organizing Drives,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 43 (1990); Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Paul Weiler, “Promises to Keep: Securing Worker Rights to Self-Organization under the NLRA,” Harvard Law Review 96 (1983). For a survey of the most recent data on illegal firings and intimidation by employers in union campaigns, see Dorian T. Warren, “Labor Policy Reform and the Obama Administration,” working paper, 2010.

19 See, Warren, “Labor Policy Reform.”

20 See, e.g., Freeman and Rogers, What Workers Want; Michael Goldfield, Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); Weiler, “Promises to Keep.”

21 William G. Whittaker, Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview [CRS Report for Congress] (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service: 2006), cited in John D. Skrentny, “After Civil Rights,” unpublished manuscript, 2009.

22 See Rogers M. Smith, “The Gathering Storm over Teaching in Higher Education,” PS Supplement (January 2010): 2.

23 Simon Head, “Inside the Leviathon,” New York Review of Books, December 16, 2004.

24 Both are quoted in Ken I. Kersch, “The New Deal Triumph as the End of History? The Judicial Negotiation of Labor Rights and Civil Rights,” in Ronald Kahn and Kersch, eds., The Supreme Court and American Political Development (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2006), 185, 188.

25 Senator Robert Wagner, Congressional Record 79 (1935): 7565.

26 Kersch, “New Deal Triumph,” 190. For this material, Kersch cites Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 249–50.

27 Greenstone, Labor In American Politics, 408.

28 See, e.g., Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Peter L. Francia, The Future of Organized Labor in American Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Terry M. Moe, “Political Control and the Power of the Agent,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 22 (no. 1, 2006): 1–29.

29 See, e.g., Janice Fine, “Community Unions and the Revival of the American Labor Movement,” Politics and Society 33 (2005): 153–99; Janice Fine and Daniel J. Tichenor, “A Movement Wrestling: Organized Labor's Enduring Struggle over Immigration, 1866–2007,” Studies in American Political Development 23 (2009): 84–113; Michael W. McCann, Rights at Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Strolovitch, Affirmative Advocacy; Dorian T. Warren, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2005; Janelle S. Wong, Democracy's Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

30 See e.g., Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

31 Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

32 Among political theorists, see, e.g., John Medearis, “Labor, Democracy, Utility and Mill's Critique of Private Property,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (2005): 135–59; Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice.

33 Margaret Levi, “Organizing Power: The Prospects for an American Labor Movement,” Perspectives on Politics 1 (no. 1, 2003): 45.

34 For the argument that unions became a conservative voice opposing the rights of many disadvantaged members of society, and particularly racial minorities, see Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). More broadly, see Margaret Weir, “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism, Studies in American Political Development 19 (2006), 157–72.

35 See, e.g., Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2003); Ruth Milkman, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).