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What Unions No Longer Do
From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in ten, and just one in twenty in the private sector--the lowest in a century. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have attempted to explain the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do lays bare the broad repercussions of labor's collapse for the American economy and polity.
Organized labor was not just a minor player during the "golden age" of welfare capitalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. Rather, for generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver tangible benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. The labor movement helped sustain an unprecedented period of prosperity among America's expanding, increasingly multiethnic middle class.
What Unions No Longer Do shows in detail the consequences of labor's curtailed advocacy for better working conditions, weakened support for immigrants' economic assimilation, and ineffectiveness in addressing wage stagnation among African Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, and the result is a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.
Organized labor was not just a minor player during the "golden age" of welfare capitalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. Rather, for generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver tangible benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. The labor movement helped sustain an unprecedented period of prosperity among America's expanding, increasingly multiethnic middle class.
What Unions No Longer Do shows in detail the consequences of labor's curtailed advocacy for better working conditions, weakened support for immigrants' economic assimilation, and ineffectiveness in addressing wage stagnation among African Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, and the result is a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published February 10, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 4, 2017
*the United States is a first world economy with third world inequality"
heavy on statistical analysis like piketty but the evidence is clear that as union membership declined, wealth inequality rose. now that membership is down, politicians, especially democrats who were champions of unions, no longer have as much incentive to hold themselves accountable to them.
heavy on statistical analysis like piketty but the evidence is clear that as union membership declined, wealth inequality rose. now that membership is down, politicians, especially democrats who were champions of unions, no longer have as much incentive to hold themselves accountable to them.
January 17, 2017
This is a book for policy wonks. Rosenfeld does a lot of statistical research on the causes of de-unionization, and the effects it has on inequality and democracy.
Possibly of use if you need to convince someone who doesn't take it as an article of faith that we need bigger and stronger unions.
Possibly of use if you need to convince someone who doesn't take it as an article of faith that we need bigger and stronger unions.
September 15, 2022
Overall, this book is a very solid look at the mechanisms of the American labor movement of the 20th Century; both its rise and its fall. However, I do feel this book gets too bogged down in the analysis aspect of what Rosenfeld is trying to do here. While this book isn't a call for action nor a speculative book, it would have been nice to talk more about how our contemporary era mirrors the time in which labor was especially weak, if not as a ray of hope but also something worth digging into a bit more.
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May 3, 2022Interesting look at what isn't happening with the decline of unions in the U.S.
November 18, 2014
Having recently read "How Not to be Wrong" about data and statistics, I came at this book with lots of skepticism. I think the author does a decent job of describing possible outcomes of the decline of labor unions in the USA. Nothing appeared to be causal however. He did a better job of describing what the decline of labor unions DIDN'T cause, and that's useful to understand. He also reminded peeps of some history that still impacts wages today, such as the 1935 NLRA exempting domestic service, "guaranteeing the continual subjugation of the female African American workforce." I recommend this to peeps who want hope for the future of USA labor unions (they've been at this low an ebb before and come back), and who want to understand better their limited impact compared to many other economic, technological and educational forces.
April 22, 2014
This a very statistics heavy exploration of unions in the United States. The author primarily looks at unions since the 1970 and uses statistics to explore the effects that the decline of unionized jobs has had on workers (both union and non-union). There is a lot of information within that is interesting, but the book didn't really grab my attention.
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August 1, 2014331.88097 R8138 2014
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews