The Direction of Union Mergers in the United States: The Rise of Conglomerate Unionism
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | Kim Moody |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00735.x |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
The Direction of Union Mergers in
the United States: The Rise of
Conglomerate Unionismbjir_735676..700
Kim Moody
Abstract
Trade union mergers have become common throughout the industrial world. In
the United States, since the late 1970s, these have become increasingly multi-
jurisdictional. Beginning in the 1990s, the trend has been dominated by five
‘conglomerate’ unions, who have embraced this as a strategy for growth and
increased effectiveness. This article will examine the roots of this ‘conglomer-
ate’ direction and quantitatively assess the claims for greater effectiveness in
finances, organizing, and collective bargaining. The tentative conclusion is that
while resources and policy matter, the conglomerate merger strategy of these
unions has not improved any of these functions either over time or in comparison
to other unions that have put less emphasis on multi-jurisdictional mergers.
1. Introduction
Trade union mergers since the Second World War have generally been seen
as a defensive reaction to declining membership, financial problems and lost
power. Small unions seek survival, while larger ones merge to keep member-
ship up, gain a broader financial basis and hold on to or even increase
bargaining power or political influence. Across the industrialized world, the
number of unions in most countries declined and the average size grew
despite the overall decline in trade union membership and density, as the rate
of mergers accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s (Waddington 2005:
31–43). Following the 1970s, however, the direction and content of these
mergers began to change across Europe as well as in the United States
(Kahmann 2003: 5). From mergers among unions within a more or less
well-defined industrial or occupational jurisdiction, unions diversified
the range of industries and occupations they represented in search of
Kim Moody is Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Research in Employment Studies at
the University of Hertfordshire.
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00735.x
47:4 December 2009 0007–1080 pp. 676–700
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
institutional survival and/or growth. More recently, however, this multi-
jurisdictional form of unionism has become less random and has even taken
on the character of a strategy for trade union revival. This has led to the
development of multi-sectoral ‘super-unions’ such as ver.di in Germany
(Waddington et al. 2003: 9–10) and, most recently, UNITE in the UK
(Labour Research 2007: 14–5).
The purpose of this article is to examine the trend towards multi-
jurisdictional unionism through union mergers in the United States. Mergers
include both amalgamations and absorptions, with the latter predominating
throughout the entire period. Amalgamation refers to the merger of two or
more unions of similar size in which the structure and sometimes the name of
the union changes. Absorption means the merger of a smaller union into a
larger one in which the identity of the larger union changes little. For the
purposes of this article, mergers are limited to national unions and do not
include the various affiliations by local or state-level organizations with
national unions as there is no consistent data for these.
Union jurisdiction can be a slippery concept. In the United States, almost
half the craft or specialty unions in entertainment, construction, education
and public employment remain primarily true to their original jurisdiction
even today. Union jurisdictions, however, can not only change as occupa-
tions and industries change, but also as a union broadens its definition of a
jurisdiction or adopts a new broad jurisdiction in which it becomes one of the
dominant unions in a particular industry or occupation. An example of
a union that broadened its jurisdiction was the absorption of the Shoe
Workers by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1979. In this study, this
merger will be considered jurisdictional as a broadening of the union’s
industrial definition as an organization of clothing workers. The merger of
the Distributive Workers into the United Auto Workers, or that of the
Upholsterers into the United Steelworkers, on the other hand, were clearly
non-jurisdictional.
The designation of jurisdictional mergers refers to the core jurisdictions of
the merging or absorbing unions as they were when the postwar bargaining
system took shape in the 1940s and 1950s, or where there is a reasonable
economic logic or major overlap in industrial or occupational terms. The
central concern here is with the direction of mergers away from those that
consolidate organization within a coherent jurisdiction or vertically inte-
grated industry. The focus of this article will be on larger unions with sub-
stantial resources who have sought to absorb those smaller unions in a
variety of jurisdictions in order to maintain or increase size and resources.
The structure of this study is in five parts including the conclusions. The
first part examines the patterns of union mergers in terms of the trend
towards non-jurisdictional mergers particularly from the 1980s onward, and
the rise of five ‘conglomerate unions’ that came to dominate the merger trend
in the 1990s and 2000s. The second part examines the roots of the trend
towards non-jurisdictional mergers in the rapid decline of the post-WWII
industrial relations system in the 1980s. It is argued that the restructuring of
Direction of Union Mergers in the United States 677
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009.
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