The End of the Road for American Labour, or a Blueprint for Union Revival?
| Author | John Logan |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00671.x |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
EXTENDED REVIEW
The End of the Road for American Labour, or a Blueprint for
Union Revival?
Justice on the Job: Perspectives on the Erosion of Collective Bargaining in the United
States edited by Richard N. Bloch, Sheldon Friedman, Michelle Kaminski and
Andy Levin. W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo,
Michigan, 2006, vi +355 pp., ISBN 978-0-88099-278-7, US$22.00.
The erosion of collective bargaining in the United States is hardly a new topic of
study. Collective bargaining coverage has been falling since its high point in the
mid-1950s, and union decline had reached crisis proportions by the late 1980s. Unions
were haemorrhaging membership in traditional mass-production industries such as
steel, auto, textiles, and rubber, and making little headway organizing in new sectors
of the economy; hostile employers were hiring sophisticated ‘union avoidance’ con-
sultants in organizing campaigns and threatening to recruit permanent replacements
during bargaining campaigns. Republican Senators had blocked a union-sponsored
bill to reform the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to strengthen workers’ right
to organize, and the anti-union policies of the Reagan and Bush Sr. National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) and Department of Labor facilitated this employer assault
on organized labour. Adding to labour’s woes were structural changes in the
economy, heightened international competition, deregulation, more sophisticated
management techniques and unions’ own failure to devote sufficient resources to new
organizing campaigns. Thus, while several factors have contributed to the crisis of
organized labour in the United States, aggressive employer opposition and govern-
ment failure to protect the right to organize and bargain collectively loom large in
most academic explanations. The diverse essays in this valuable collection are no
exception. Now, more than ever, the American labour movement needs from its
academic allies fresh ideas about how to combat employer opposition, remedy defi-
ciencies in the law and promote union revitalization. In this respect, Justice on the Job
is best described as a qualified success. Some essays provide important insights on
familiar topics; others explore relatively new and under-studied issues, while the
absence of several critical subjects is striking.
Several of the essays retread familiar ground — ‘labour rights as human rights’, the
failure of American labour law to meet internationally recognized standards for fair
and free union elections, the federal government’s failure to ratify and enforce Inter-
national Labor Organization (ILO) conventions on freedom of association and the
right to bargain collectively, the exclusion of a large and growing number of private-
sector workers from the meagre and inadequate protections of the NLRA, collective
bargaining rights (or lack thereof) for public-sector workers, the legal status of
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00671.x
46:1 March 2008 0007–1080 pp. 193–199
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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