* Book Review: Union Responses to Neo-Liberalism

ILRReview
Volume 58 | Number 4 Article 81
2005
International Handbook of Trade Unions
John T. Addison
Claus Schnabel
International Handbook of Trade Unions
This book review is available in ILRReview: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol58/iss4/81
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BOOK REVIEWS
✣
Labor-Management Relations
International Handbook of Trade Unions. Edited
by John T. Addison and Claus Schnabel.
Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2003.
viii, 555 pp. ISBN 1-84064-979-8, $225.00
(cloth).
This edited volume consists of fourteen separately
authored chapters dealing from an international
perspective with various dimensions of
trade unionism. Among the specific areas covered
are the determinants of trade union membership;
models of union behavior; bargaining;
strikes; union effects on wages, wage structures,
productivity, financial performance of firms,
macroeconomic performance, and innovation
in firms; and political dimensions of unions.
Also included are some in-depth analyses of
industrial relations and union developments in
two key countries—the United States and the
United Kingdom—and across several countries
of continental Europe. The authors, who are
noted scholars from a variety of countries with
expertise on unions and industrial relations,
have produced a much-needed synthesis of the
empirical research on unions.
Most of the articles approach the analysis of
union behavior and outcomes from the perspective
of economics. This orientation is especially
appropriate in the studies’ treatment of
empirical evidence. The chapters are very thorough
syntheses and critical analyses of empirical
findings on unions. I believe that the discussion
of theories and models of union behavior
would have benefited from more extensive presentation
of theoretical perspectives from other
disciplines. Still, notwithstanding the volume’s
mainly economic focus, several aspects of unionism
are explicitly approached from an interdisciplinary
perspective, and many articles account
for institutional considerations. Notable
among these chapters are ones devoted to political
and industrial relations developments
associated with trade unions.
The great strength of the volume is that it
provides a thorough set of analyses of the extant
empirical evidence regarding union effects. The
evidence is carefully examined and synthesized
and the reader is left with a clear sense of what
we know and what we do not know about “what
unions do.” The chapters, taken together, cover
all the main areas of academic research on
union effects, including bargaining, strikes,
wages and wage structures, productivity, economic
performance, and innovation. In some
cases, the studies also provide fresh empirical
evidence, and most of them offer new insights
into trade unions. In a number of the chapters,
the reviews of empirical evidence also span a
fairly broad set of countries. To varying degrees
across chapters, the studies explain the main
theoretical models for considering union effects
in an accessible manner and in ways that
place the empirical evidence in context.
Another strength of the volume is two chapters
that cover industrial relations and unionism
in considerable depth—one on the United
Kingdom, by John Addison and Stanley Siebert,
and the other on the United States, by John
Delaney. Both studies represent major contributions
to our understanding of the main factors
affecting trade unions and the current state
and future prospects of unions in these two
countries. These studies are also important
because they include analyses of institutional
considerations affecting trade unions. The
United Kingdom and United States warrant
examination in great depth because their union
movements date back to the formative years of
industrial development, have had significant
effects domestically, and have also had a formative
impact on trade unionism in other countries.
If the volume’s strength lies largely in the
thoroughness with which it surveys trade unionism
and industrial relations developments in
Western industrialized countries—the United
States, the United Kingdom and, to some extent,
Europe—its major shortcoming is its lack
of similar attention to other major countries
with important and established labor movements,
or newly evolving labor movements. The
addition of country studies on (for example)
Japan, India, South Korea, and Mexico would
have better validated the volume’s claim to international
scope.
One might defend the predominantly Western
focus by arguing that most available empirical
evidence on trade unionism is in fact specific
to Western countries, and, after all, a main
objective of the volume is to assess what we know
based on available evidence. But without greater
attention paid to the development and effects
of trade unionism in other areas of the world,
654 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW
especially Asia and South America, the nature
of trade unionism and, more important, the
potential future role of unions in an increasingly
global world will remain only partially
understood. The characterization of the volume
as a handbook on trade unionism is well
deserved, but the international descriptor must
therefore be somewhat qualified. The editors
themselves identify this limitation.
A solid comparative analysis by Jelle Visser,
explicitly devoted to unionism worldwide, goes
some way toward alleviating the volume’s main
shortcoming. As such, it is a welcome part of the
mix.
This volume’s limitations do not take away
from its substantial contribution. The chapters
are of uniformly very high quality and, taken
together, represent an authoritative and comprehensive
assessment of the behavior and effects
of trade unions, at least in the West. This
truly state-of-the-art collection earns the moniker
“handbook,” and deserves to be placed within
close reach as a standard reference.
Richard P. Chaykowski
Associate Professor
School of Policy Studies
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario
New Frontiers of Democratic Participation at
Work. Edited by Michael Gold. Burlington,
Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. 344 pp. ISBN 0-7546-
0924-3, $89.95 (cloth).
The significance and strength of this volume
of essays lie in its political message. The 13
contributors are committed, one and all, to the
political idea that workers are both able and
entitled to participate in the democratic shaping
of the economy at the sectoral and company
level. That idea, although clothed here in modern
guise, has a fairly long history. Notably, by
the early 1900s, and with renewed vigor in the
wakes of the two World Wars, it was propounded
by the reformist labor movement in Europe—
the wing that ultimately gained the upper hand
over its revolutionary socialist adversary. In
their introduction to this book the editor and
two co-authors express their conviction thus:
“Rather than a quantum leap in the form of one
grand revolution, [we see] the participation
process as a chain of little revolutions.”
The reader is not, however, browbeaten to
swear fealty to the idea of democratic participation,
but rather is supplied with scientific analysis,
argument, and information that lend credence
to the authors’ conclusion that there is
indeed a historical trend toward a civil society.
Precisely because the contributors to the volume
are anything but naive, their optimistic
stance comes to seem plausible. They are well
aware that the reformist idea of participation
was not without its own failings and setbacks:
“The twentieth century experiences of Utopian
work organizations without money, without
managers or without markets have generally
failed.” The authors are referring here to the
failures of the kibbutzim movement, the worker
take-over of ailing companies, and self-management
experiments in Yugoslavia, as well as to
the disappointment that followed in the wake of
formerly “hope-raising cases” in developing
countries.
It is hardly surprising that this reworking of
the reformist philosophy should take as its basis
the experiences with institutionalized forms of
employee representation in the countries of
western Europe, for here participation seems to
have proved a win-win game for everyone involved.
“The role of capital is not eliminated
but put under greater democratic control.” The
keywords for the modernized version of democratic
participation are partnership and cooperation
between capital and labor, and the expectation
is of convergence between social democracy
and economic efficiency.
Besides cogently arguing that democratic
participation is on the rise, the authors invoke
empirical material and strategic considerations
designed to show that this is the right concept
for a post-industrial society in which workers’
claim for a right to participation is increasing
while, at the same time, firms continue to need
the loyal cooperation of their employees. They
thus counter the free-market liberalism that
predominates in academia and public opinion
and according to which the revolution in participation
is responsible for the current stagnation
of western Europe. In other words, the
coordinated market economy (CME), so strongly
influenced by social democratic reformist ideas
and Catholic social teaching, is certified by the
authors as fit for the future and encouraged not
to give way to the engine of the Anglo-Saxon
“liberal market economy.”
Since the collection’s authors stress the manifest
changes attributable to the transition from
an industrial society to a services society, a frequently
recurring question relates to the future
of the trade unions: “Can the traditional institutions
of labour relations cope with the micro-,