Seymour Martin Lipset and Noah M. Meltz's The Paradox of American Unionism

...Polling data they themselves present BOOKS indicate that, since the mid-1980s, the attitudinal differences actually have been rather small...

...0 VER THE PAST few decades in the United States, laws have become ever less effective in protecting the right of workers to join a union of their choice without reprisal...

...THE PARADOX Lipset and Meltz examine is the divergence between public attitudes toward unionism and actual union density...

...With membership low and falling, unions have had less and less ability to set industry-wide wage and benefit levels, let alone norms for the economy as a whole, which for a brief period after World War II they could do...

...But Mills supplemented his survey results with his own observations of the labor movement and society, intermingling tables summarizing questionnaire responses with bold contentions and idiosyncratic formulations about the trajectory of American politics and labor...

...His most recent book was Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II...

...Conversely, they argue, "If unions are considered weak [as in the United States] they are more liked than if they are seen as strong and militant...

...However, if values have only a weak link to the creation and enforcement of law, and it is the legal regime that matters more than anything else in determining union density, then unions need to use their still considerable political clout in a more intense and concerted campaign for labor law reform, an effort they have recently reinitiated...

...In the right hands, survey data can provide a jumping off point for deep insight into society...

...The limits of survey data also are suggested in the responses of U. S. managers to questions about unions: 68 percent said that they approved of unions (compared to 57 percent of Canadian managers), and 59 percent said that if a group of their employees tried to unionize, they would either welcome the union or do nothing to stop it (compared to 37 percent of Canadian managers...

...Instead, they repeatedly fight defensive struggles to defeat anti-union candidates or block anti-union legislation...

...The best-known practitioner of cross-border comparison has been veteran sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who has been studying, for two decades, the differences between Canada and the United States, not only in the realm of labor but more broadly in their social values and political institutions...

...By 2003, their share had fallen to just 12.9 percent...

...In 1958, unions represented a third of the workforce...

...Furthermore, the authors' survey found that Canadian managers had greater hostility to102 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 ward unions than their U.S...

...Although plausible, this explanation cannot be proven using the survey data the authors rely on, which reveal correlations, not causes...

...What conclusions does this research suggest for those in the field, trying to organize workers...

...counterparts, bringing into question a common explanation for the low level of unionization in the United States, exceptionally strong anti-unionism among employers...

...Though union membership has declined in most industrialized countries, the United States is an outlier, with a union density well below that in other developed countries (with the exception of France, where unions have proportionately even fewer members, but exert much greater economic and political power...

...Doing so might bring into question the methodology of their study, because public opinion— the object of survey research—sometimes has relatively little to do with law making or the skew of administrative proceedings...

...If, as Lipset and Meltz assert, values matter the most in explaining national differences, we are unlikely to see any rapid increase in union density in the United States, for, as they say, "culture changes slowly...

...Lipset and Meltz's own 1996 binational telephone survey confirmed this finding and allowed them to look more closely at attitudes among various subgroups...

...Lipset and Meltz stick closer to their data set and lack Mills's intellectual daring...

...Looking abroad provides some clues...

...THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN UNIONISM: WHY AMERICANS LIKE UNIONS MORE THAN CANADIANS Do BUT JOIN MUCH LESS by Seymour Martin Lipset and Noah M. Meltz, with Rafael Gomez and Ivan Katchanovski ILR Press, 2004 208 pp $32.50 DECLINING UNION membership has been a major factor in the increase in economic inequality in the United States...

...Not only did the general public prove more favorable toward unions in the United States than in Canada but so did union members...

...In addition, striking workers in Canada have much stronger rights to reclaim their jobs than in the United States, where the declining frequency of strikes has made unionism less visible as a means for workers to assert power...

...Lipset and Meltz spend too much effort trying to explain the differing public attitudes toward unions in the United States and Canada...

...They argue that public values— in contrast to attitudes toward specific issues, like those measured in their survey (a murky distinction)—ultimately shape national law and account for the differences between Canada and the United States that have been so important in determining the success or failure of union recruitment...

...If the labor movement and its allies can create as much pressure on legislators to address the effective abrogation of the right to organize as they get about, say, gun laws or from corporations for tax breaks, workers south of the border may again match the union density to the north, even if many are, as Lipset and Meltz contend, individualistic outliers on the global value charts...

...The authors acknowledge the importance of legal structures in accounting for national differences, but keep returning to variations in political culture...

...Provincial law regulates most labor relations, so there are variations across the country, but in most of Canada unions can achieve recognition through card check—presenting representation cards signed by a majority of a firm's employees—without going through the lengthy election process prescribed in U.S...

...Corporations have become more aggressive in circumventing or breaking labor laws, guided by sophisticated anti-union law firms and consultants and aided by a lack of timely enforcement by increasingly conservative and business-oriented federal appointees...

...For Lipset, the key to understanding the United States, including the weakness of its labor movement, lies in the heritage of its revolution, which he sees as quintessentially liberal, with a stress on individual freedom...

...program in history of the City University of New York Graduate Center...

...A small academic industry has grown up to try to explain why union density north of the U.S.-Canadian border is more than double that to the south...

...To explain this gap, Lipset and Meltz turn, in part, toward the same factor U.S...

...He is currently working on a history of the United States since World War II (forthcoming, Viking...

...These responses are so at odds with actual employer behavior in the United States that they suggest either that respondents to the Lipset and Meltz survey did not express their honest views or that control of labor relations is highly centralized in a tiny, unrepresentative subset of managers...

...In Canada, legal changes generally have gone the other way, toward facilitating union organizing...

...But they fail to detail a mechanism linking values and legislative outcomes...

...In 1963, 29 percent of the workers in each country carried a union card, but thereafter the percentage in the United DISSENT / Fall 2004 •10I BOOKS States plunged, while in Canada it grew, exceeding 38 percent in the mid-1980s before dropping to 30 percent in 2001...

...In rejecting revolutionary struggle, Lipset contends, Canada set out on a path of giving greater priority to the common good, which in recent decades has taken the form of a social democratic predilection...

...Lipset has attributed the differences between the countries to different value systems that emerged from different histories in the Age of Revolution...

...When elections are required in Canada, strict time limits minimize anti-union employer pressure...

...In this case, the intense strategic debate among unionists about how to organize may not make all that much difference, though the influx of immigrants from societies with different political histories and values might...

...Lipset and Meltz suggest that a large, powerful union movement—such as that in Canada—generates opposition in all sectors of society, out of the perception that it exerts too much economic clout, has too great potential for disruption, and plays too large a role in politics...

...For most of the period since 1941, public opinion polls have indicated higher levels of approval for unions in the United States than in Canada, including during most of the 1990s, when actual union membership was proportionately much greater in Canada than in the United States...

...Although it reiterates ideas Lipset has laid out before, it raises issues of interest even to those skeptical of his explanatory scheme...

...The authors note that the Canadian parliamentary system created opportunities lacking in the United States for the rise of socialist and social democratic parties that pushed pro-union legislation...

...However, they do not discuss why south of the border the prounion public opinion they make so much of has meant so little in the legislative arena...

...union leaders have focused on, differences in labor law...

...This familiar and grim picture has sparked intense debate among union activists about how to reverse the membership decline and among academics about what has caused it...

...Although unions still have considerable power in the electoral arena, rarely can they mobilize it to set the social agenda or win new benefits for working people...

...C. Wright Mills's classic 1948 study, The New Men of Power, utilized the most pedestrian of methods—a survey of labor leaders— to come to shrewd conclusions about the state of the union movement...

...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 103...

...Lipset's latest crossborder study is The Paradox of American Unionism, co-written with the late Canadian industrial relations scholar Noah Meltz...

...Canada offers a particularly intriguing comparison, because at least superficially it so resembles the United States, yet it differs radically in its pattern of union membership...

...The income gap between workers and top managers grows ever wider, company-financed health insurance and pensions become less common and less generous, and the capacity of workers to challenge supervisors diminishes as collective organization shrivels...

...JOSHUA B. FREEMAN is professor of history and chair of the Ph.D...

...The more important difference to be explained is in union density: although a majority of the public in both the United States and Canada professes to approve of unions, in the United States only one out of eight workers belongs to a union, compared to nearly one out of three in Canada...

...law, which provides an opportunity for companies to stall and intimidate workers...