Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00265 |
| Date | 01 March 2003 |
| Published date | 01 March 2003 |
BOOK REVIEWS
The Role of Unions in the Twenty-First Century: A Study for the Fondazione Rodolfo
Debenedetti edited by Tito Boeri, Agar Brugiavini and Lars Calmfors, with
Alison Booth, Michael Burda, Daniele Checchi, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Richard
Freeman, Pietro Garibaldi, Bertil Holmlund, Robin Naylor, Martin Schludi,
Thierry Verdier and Jelle Visser. Oxford University Press, 2001, xv + 304 pp.,
ISBN 0 19 924657 2, £16.99 paper.
What a wonderful book! This volume’s rare virtues are worth an exclamation point –
not because it is easy reading or entertaining, nor because it poses a dramatically
novel thesis, but because it boldly takes on large and difficult questions and tests
them from multiple perspectives, yielding answers that are so rich and substantive
that they provide a long and satisfying feast for those interested in the future
of industrial relations. In an age of too many cautious studies testing narrow
hypotheses with single data sources, this stands out for its co-ordinated multi-
disciplinary stance (it is written by a consortium of economists, political scientists
and sociologists from a number of different countries), its willingness to follow
important questions as far as possible, its rigour in attempting to bring the best
possible systematic data to bear, its openness to conflicting evidence, and its patience
in trying to bring those apparent conflicts into some sort of alignment.
The book is organized in two long essays. The first deals with factors affecting
union membership and the structure of collective bargaining. The main conclusions
are that membership is likely to continue its already-long decline, and that the
decentralization of bargaining is also likely to continue, despite some specific pan-
European initiatives. The second essay focuses on the relation of unions to welfare
states, and in particular on the problems caused by intergenerational conflicts within
unions. The style is dense and cautious, with many charts and tables and some use of
regression analyses. Some chapters are dominated by economic perspectives, but
technical/mathematical modelling is relegated to an appendix; in general, the
dialogue among disciplines keeps the writing from becoming too narrowly focused
on any one methodology or problem definition.
The central themes emerging from these detailed analyses are disturbing from
many points of view. First, the authors argue that the best chance for union growth,
for a smooth European transition to global competitiveness and for social justice
is for unions to become more encompassing, incorporating a larger proportion
British Journal of Industrial Relations
41:1 March 2003 0007–1080 pp. 135–160
#Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
and wider variety of workers. This would have the dual beneficial effect of
(a) encouraging equalization, perhaps reducing the danger of the dual economy
that can be seen emerging especially in the economies of southern Europe, with
the explosive growth of temporary and contingent work; and (b) promoting eco-
nomically responsible union policies, favourable to needed reforms, as opposed to
narrow interest-based advocacy. ‘The good face of unions’, argue the authors, ‘can
prevail only if unions succeed in encompassing a sufficiently broad range of interests’
(p. ix).
The second theme, however – and this is the disturbing part – is that this is not
likely to happen. Several reasons are developed in various chapters. The widespread
‘seniority bias’ documented in the second essay leads almost all unions to favour
older workers’ interests at the expense of both younger workers and the economic
health of the society as a whole. Seniority bias generally leads to a conservative,
‘status quo’ orientation and a resistance to facing the challenges of competitiveness.
It may have even more negative effects: there has been a truly startling rush to early
retirement, strongly encouraged by unions: ‘today more than every second older man
of working age (55–64) has already withdrawn from the labour market’ (p. 220; this
is further detailed in two of the book’s many elegant charts). The economic effects
are so damaging that there is widespread agreement on the need to reverse the trend,
but the industrial relations landscape makes such a U-turn extremely difficult. As the
first essay demonstrates, moreover, the age split is not the only problem: workers’
interests in general are becoming more diverse and even conflicting, making it ever
more difficult to build wider solidarities. Younger workers in nearly all countries, as
well as contingents and part-time workers, have lower unionization rates; and
technology-based skill differentials have also introduced new divisions. Finally,
changes in the nature of work, driven primarily by employer interests, create a
pressure for decentralization that the authors see as probably irresistible in the long
run. These multiple forces make large-scale unified unionism less and less sustain-
able, and also contribute to the prediction that union membership will continue
to fall.
The authors see one possible way out. Several times they come round to a
close examination of the one exception and hopeful sign for the future: the ‘Ghent
system’, found today in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, in which unions
directly administer unemployment funds (and sometimes other benefits). This
naturally attracts a great many members: union density in these countries has
remained extremely high and stable compared with all other countries. The authors
develop a theoretical argument suggesting that the model could have broader social
benefits as well. First, because it encourages unemployed and underemployed
workers to join unions (rather than dropping out, as they do in all other systems),
it could help prevent the emergence of a dual economy with many contingent
workers; full-time and contingent workers would be aligned within a single organ-
ization. Second, because unions administer the unemployment funds themselves, they
have an incentive to get people back to work and to sanction those who reject job
offers.
But the authors stop well short of proposing the Ghent model as a solution to the
ills of the industrial relations system. For one thing, the empirical evidence on these
points is weak: there is no clear effect of the Ghent system on unemployment levels,
and (somewhat strangely) no systematic data are presented about the nature of
contingent work in these countries. More deeply, there is an uneasy sense that the
high unionization levels produced in Ghent systems do not necessarily translate into
136 British Journal of Industrial Relations
#Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2003.
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