What Do Unions Do?
Levinson, Marc
Sticking with the union WHAT DO UNIONS DO? Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff Basic Books, $22.95, 293 pp. Marc Levinson BEHIND the rightward lurch in America has been a shortage of...
...It should prove a valuable weapon to the labor leaders seeking to organize a generation which has grown up suspicious of a unionism it knows all too little about...
...The firm can safely ignore the wishes of older workers who have little mobility...
...For union workers at age twenty, the value of major fringes — vacation, insurance, pensions — is only slightly more than what an average nonunion worker receives...
...Their work has been accompanied by the steady public relations of the National Right-to-Work Legal Defense Fund, an employer-funded organization which defends workers' "rights" not to pay union dues, and by a concerted campaign in the halls of Congress to show that union violence is the major labor relations problem in America today...
...Freeman and Medoff weaken their own arguments by a reluctance to criticize the House of Labor...
...With a union, on the other hand, the median worker — the one whose vote will win the representation election, or make a majority in a union local meeting — is likely to be the focus of attention...
...While well-funded neoconservatives have produced tome after tome showing that less government and more free markets cure all ills, economists who see a need for stabilizing institutions in a world of imperfect markets and persistent class distinctions have all but abandoned the field to the likes of Murray Wiedejibaum and George Gilder...
...Unions also offer workers a collective voice which may lead to a more efficient selection of wages and benefits...
...Is it really most efficient to sign contracts which benefit the oldest workers most, often a shortsighted step which alienates younger workers from the labor movement...
...The slowdown in union organizing — the authors estimate that as much as a third of the decline in union election victories is due to reduced organizing — is well treated, but there is no discussion of the internal cost/benefit calculus most unions now consider before embarking on organizing drives...
...Unions thus systematically rearrange working conditions in favor of older workers...
...For blue-collar workers, wages are 19 percent higher in the presence of a union than without one...
...Marc Levinson BEHIND the rightward lurch in America has been a shortage of intellectual thought on the left...
...As a whole, society may be better off for the union presence...
...In addition, unionized firms are far more likely than non-union firms to lay off fewer senior workers first and to promote workers based on seniority...
...What of the interests of union staff in maintaining their own importance, an interest which colors every aspect of labor relations from the persistence of obsolete craft unions to the tardy emergence of flexible benefit programs to replace the large health and welfare plans which unions help to run...
...Contrary to the assertions of many economists, unions do raise wages...
...Benefits are more in line with average workers' needs...
...Working conditions — "public goods" in the workplace, for which few individual workers would stick out their necks — are improved...
...Commonweal: 92...
...The smaller the employer, the greater the difference a union contract will make to the workers...
...Overall, these activities contribute to a more equal distribution of income...
...Unionized white-collar workers, by contrast, earn wages only 4 percent higher than their non-union counterparts, which may be one reason for labor's repeated failure to make inroads among that group...
...The authors show this clearly in their analysis of government data on fringe benefits...
...And, certainly, much of the social legislation of the past two decades, from the Civil Rights Act to the Occupational Safety and Health Act, would not be on the books without the efforts of organized labor...
...Those higher wages do increase income inequality between union and non-union workers...
...The much-criticized "monopoly face" of unions is indeed socially harmful, Freeman and Medoff agree, but it is not the only face unions present...
...By age sixty, however, the value of those fringes is 23 percent of the union worker's wage, compared to only 15 percent of the lower wage of the non-union worker...
...With careful analysis of data from a wide variety of government surveys and private studies, What Do Unions Do...
...In the industries where they are most powerful, unions deprive firms of monopoly profits by insisting on a share for their members...
...Income inquality is less...
...Despite these flaws, Freeman and Medoff cover vast and important ground in this data-filled book...
...Without a union, employers will tailor compensa8 February 1985: 91 tion to the marginal worker, typically a younger worker whom the firm is seeking to attract or retain...
...Few institutions have suffered more from the attacks of the free marketeers, who view unions as monopolistic institutions creating inefficiencies, reducing employment, and gaining inflated wages for their members while reducing pay for non-members...
...Into this void step two Harvard economists, Richard Freeman and James Medoff, with the strongest intellectual defense of the labor movement to emerge in a decade...
...attempts to prove quantitatively a claim that flies in the face of the prevailing view: unions are good, the authors conclude, not only for union members but for society as a whole...
...But that effect is more than counteracted by unions' influence in reducing income differences within plants and between white-collar and blue-collar workers...
Vol. 112 • February 1985 • No. 3
