The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States. by Michael GoldfieldReview by: David LewinIndustrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Apr., 1989), pp. 462-463Published by: Cornell University, School of Industrial & Labor RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2523405 .

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462 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

by a number of members of the "right to work" group. It is the view that majority-rule union- ism (or exclusive representation) "may fairly be described as the beginning of a fascistic regulation of our quasi-syndicalist system of industrial democracy" (p. 286). This character- ization betrays a serious misconception of both Italian fascism and American trade unionism and collective bargaining. On the one hand, it ignores the pervasive violent and ugly features of fascism. On the other hand, it attempts to tag American unions with qualities that are exhibited by only a small minority.

Milton Derber Professor Emeritus Institute of Labor and

Industrial Relations University of Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign

Labor-Management Relations

Union Strategy and Industrial Change. Edited by Stephen J. Frenkel. Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales University Press, 1987. 192 pp. $19.95.

This volume contains eight chapters dealing with contemporary issues facing the Australian trade union movement, all of which were given as papers at a March 1986 conference. Except for Frenkel, the authors are not leading acade- mics or practitioners of Australian industrial re- lations, but younger radical scholars or low-level trade union officers. They have reached no clear consensus on what they mean by "industrial change," and the chapters range from interest- ing and informative to overstated and silly.

For the most part, the first four chapters are long on rhetoric and assertion and short on useful analysis. The most irritating chapter is that by Alex Carey, on corporate attempts to manage public opinion. Starting with the sensible proposition that corporations (like other groups) will attempt to convince others of views that serve their own interests, Carey leaps to a series of exaggerations and unsup- ported assertions about both the United States and Australia, climaxing in the exclamation on page 45, "Orwell! Where are you?" Editor! Where were you when this completely inappro- priate comment slipped into your volume? Similarly, the chapter on public sector manage- ment consists largely of unsupported radical rhetoric, and the chapter on the decline in manufacturing seems to take the view that the manufacturing sector and manufacturing em-

ployment must be preserved no matter how inefficient, and foresees consequences from the continued decline of that sector that seem quite fanciful.

Just when the reader has begun to despair of finding anything useful in this volume, the last four chapters appear. The best of these is Rich- ard Curtain's brief discussion of retrenchment policies. That discussion is creative and insight- ful and presents several policy alternatives that merit very serious consideration. The chapters on the metal industry, technological change, and women also contain interesting bits of informa- tion and sensible analysis of recent trends.

For the American reader, this volume will provide relatively little information on the state of Australian trade unions. It will, however, provide some insight into the nature of radical analysis of Australian labor issues at both its best and its worst.

Clifford B. Donn Professor Department of Industrial Relations Le Moyne College

The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States. By Michael Goldfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. xv, 294 Pp

This book, which is based on the author's doctoral dissertation in political science at the University of Chicago, is an attempt to identify the causes of unionism's decline in the United States and to suggest actions that the labor movement can take to turn this decline around. The book is organized into four major parts, the first three dealing with the general weak- nesses of organized labor in the United States, the extent and meaning of unionism's decline, and the reasons underlying the decline, and the fourth summarizing Goldfield's key conclu- sions about the decline and discussing the prospects for its reversal.

Goldfield does not employ or develop a gen- eral model of unionism to frame his work. Rather, he examines data on unionism, collective bar- gaining, the labor force, public opinion, and Na- tional Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union cer- tification elections to identify certain factors that seem to bear on the decline of unionism. In ad- dition, he reviews literature from sociology, eco- nomics, political science, law, industrial rela- tions, and other disciplines. In other words, this book is, for the most part, an atheoretical em- pirical study, and it must therefore be assessed

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BOOK REVIEWS 463

largely on the basis of the methodology and an- alytical techniques that are applied to the data.

In those terms, Goldfield's work is disap- pointing, because it adds little to what we already know about the decline of U.S. unionism. Indeed, early in the book Goldfield reviews and restates several of the factors that numerous other researchers have shown to be related to unionism's decline-for example, the shift to a service economy, the growth of competition in most major sectors of the economy, the shift of capital and labor to the South and the sunbelt area (where there has long been pronounced opposition to unions), increasingly negative public opinion about unions, and the growth of white-collar employ- ment. The vast bulk of Goldfield's empirical work, however, is devoted to NLRB union representation election outcomes, which read- ers of the Review know well have featured declining union "win" rates.

The study of NLRB election outcomes is per- haps the most frustrating portion of Goldfield's study. On the one hand, he specifies certain re- gression equations in which a union win in a representation election serves as the dependent variable, and he tests the equations against NLRB election data for 1935-80 and sub-periods thereof. On the other hand, he appears rela- tively uninterested in the results of the regres- sion analyses; he relegates most of them to ap- pendices, rather than presenting them in the text, does not discuss the coefficients on the indepen- dent variables, fails to present tests of statistical significance, and says little about how his results comport with those produced by other research- ers. This neglect is contrary to the author's stated interest in explaining the causes of U.S. union- ism's decline.

Goldfield's empirical work may legitimately be criticized, further, for failing to consider (1) that employers' "new" human resource man- agement policies and practices may, in some quarters, serve as a substitute for unionism; (2) that U.S. unions have achieved notable post- World War II legislative successes, not in labor-management relations but, instead, in such areas as equal employment opportunity, occupational safety and health, and pension protection; and (3) that the decline in the union "win" rate in NLRB representation elections began in 1942, rather than being a more recent phenomenon. (Block and Wolkinson, "Delay in the Union Campaign Election Revisited: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis," in Ad- vances in Industrial and Labor Relations, Vol. 3, edited by David B. Lipsky and David Lewin [Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1986].)

In the latter part of his book Goldfield con-

cludes that most of the supposed key determi- nants of U.S. unionism's decline are of little con- sequence, and cites instead three other factors: the increasingly anti-labor character of U.S. la- bor policy, the increased effectiveness of em- ployer resistance to unions, and the declining aggressiveness of unions in organizing new work- ers. He argues that to overcome the last of these factors, the U.S. labor movement must both ap- preciate and return to its earlier tradition of mil- itancy, which involves embracing rather than sup- pressing dissident members and shedding organized labor's pro-capitalist stance. As a po- litical scientist, Goldfield might well have exam- ined the extent to which the merger of the AFL with the CIO in 1955 inhibited competition among unions for members and thus contrib- uted to the decline of unionism in the United States. Although he does not do this, he does argue that the union movement must come to terms with its historical role as a defensive ele- ment of society, one that seeks to protect work- ers against the onslaught of external competition and internal bureaucratization.

Such a thesis is provocative and, had it been more fully developed in this book, might have provided the intellectual underpinnings for the revitalization-perhaps even the dominance- of the leftist-radical wing of the U.S. labor movement. Unfortunately, however, Goldfield suppresses this thesis as an organizing frame- work for his work and approaches it only tangentially via an empirical methodology emphasizing regression analysis that seeks to be in the academic mainstream.

Goldfield seems to have some important things to say about the decline of the U.S. labor movement and about the prospects for its revitalization. It is a pity that his call for a historically driven return to a more militant U.S. labor movement is overshadowed by a half-finished exercise in modern empiricism.

David Lewin Professor of Business Director, Industrial Relations

Research Center Columbia University Graduate

School of Business

The New Unionism: Employee Involvement in the Changing Corporation. By Charles C. Heckscher. New York: Twentieth Century Fund (Basic Books), 1988. xi, 302 pp. $21.95.

Those now seeking to expand the extent of

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