An Ownership Theory Of The Trade Union

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.

Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff’s now classic 1984 book What Do Unions Do? stimulated an enormous theoretical and empirical literature on the economic impact of trade unions. Trade unions continue to be a significant feature of many labor markets, particularly in developing countries, and issues of labor market regulations and labor institutions remain critically important to researchers and policy makers. The relations between unions and management can range between cooperation and conflict; unions have powerful offsetting wage and non-wage effects that economists and other social scientists have long debated. Do the benefits of unionism exceed the costs to the economy and society writ large, or do the costs exceed the benefits? The Economics of Trade Unions offers the first comprehensive review, analysis and evaluation of the empirical literature on the microeconomic effects of trade unions using the tools of meta-regression analysis to identify and quantify the economic impact of trade unions, as well as to correct research design faults, the effects of selection bias and model misspecification. This volume makes use of a unique dataset of hundreds of empirical studies and their reported estimates of the microeconomic impact of trade unions. Written by three authors who have been at the forefront of this research field (including the co-author of the original volume, What Do Unions Do?), this book offers an overview of a subject that is of huge importance to scholars of labor economics, industrial and employee relations, and human resource management, as well as those with an interest in meta-analysis.

The crisis in trade unionism is now a prevailing concern in the United States, as well as in Europe. Its main symptom is, of course, the decrease in union membership. Still, other, less observable elements account for the concern, namely the obsolescence of discourse, the decrease of militant motivation, and the question of efficiency of strikes or collective bargaining. One must keep in mind, however, that trade unions will evolve differently from one country to another. What we know about trade unions has changed over the years. We can now more accurately assess the effects of union action, especially with regard to labor market, wages, and productivity. This book adds to the assessment by integrating the new theories of organizations, contracts, and property rights. In doing so, we shift from a study of markets to one of hierarchies. Thus, the current literature comes back to its sources (but with improved analytical instruments) by returning to the Ross-Dunlop debate on the nature of the trade union. This more complex outlook of trade unions as an organization-not only as an abstract or bodyless supplier of monopolistic labor-allows one to understand better the apparent differences between unions (mainly American) whose action is oriented towards work relation ships and labor contract management and unions (European or "Latin") who are closer to a pressure group wielding power on the political front.

This book features original research underpinned with theory drawn from economics, organization theory, history and social psychology. The authors deliver a comprehensive analysis of trade unions’ prospects in the new millennium as well as case studies which deal with topical issues such as: the reasons for the loss of five million members in the 1980s and 1990s the way in which unions’ own structures inhibit their revitalization the apparent failure of unions to thrive in the benign times since 1997 the extent to which use of the internet will permit unions to break with their tradition of organizing by occupation or industry the prospects for real social partnership at national level the way in which high performance workplaces in the US give voice to workers without unions. Written by some of the leading scholars in the area, this book gives an insight into union prospects for the future and has important policy implications for all parties concerned with industrial relations, unions, employers and governments.

Annotation The Handbook brings together a systematic review of the research topics, empirical findings, and methods that comprise modern labor economics. It serves as an introduction to what has been done in this field, while at the same time indicating possible future trends which will be important in both spheres of public and private decision-making. Part 1 is concerned with the classic topics of labor supply and demand, the size and nature of the elasticities between the two, and their impact on the wage structure. This analysis touches on two fundamental questions: what are the sources of income inequality, and what are the disincentive effects of attempts to produce a more equal income distribution? The papers in Part II proceed from the common observation that the dissimilarity in worker skills and employer demands often tempers the outcomes that would be expected in frictionless labor markets. And the last section of the Handbook deals explicitly with the role of institutional structures (e.g. trade unions) that now form an important part of modern labor economics.

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