In an interview on Labour Unions

Finally, Rebuilding Labor, edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss, focuses on how unions can overcome the formidable challenges facing labour in the 21st century. What does this collection teach its readers?

What I like about this collection is that it includes the story of people who didn’t really want to be in a union. It’s rare that sociology or history books about unions treat workers who opposed unions with the respect that they deserve. Rebuilding Labor takes the point of view of all workers. It’s packed with ways that unions can change their traditional strategies for the better.

Of course, we always hope that employers in the United States will change some of their strategies. We have the most strongly anti-union employers in the advanced world. You go to any advanced country and you say, ‘Take me to your anti-union employers!’ – maybe they’ll take you to some American multinationals.

When Russian communists were threatening the free world, Americans had a greater appreciation for unions. We have unions that are pro-business and pro-capitalist. Our unions helped us defeat the threat of communism. After the fall of communism, I think people on the right lost sight of how useful unions can be, and perhaps forgot that the communists believed the employer, in the form of state enterprises, was always right, and outlawed true collective bargaining.

Does Rebuilding Labor shed light on how labour can survive the tidal wave of anti-union sentiment sweeping across American statehouses?

The authors couldn’t foresee the current wave of anti-union feeling. I don’t think anyone saw this coming, because the unions didn’t cause this recession, and they didn’t cause the budget crisis that the states are dealing with.

Collective bargaining by state and city employees is regulated by state law. Each state chooses its own laws for collective bargaining. Because some states have laws that make state and local employee bargaining difficult or even illegal, while others have laws that make collective bargaining the norm for state and local employees, we can see what unions do in the public sector by comparing states. If you look at states that don’t have much collective bargaining and ask whether or not they have lower deficits than other states, the answer is no.

The state fiscal problem – much less the country’s anemic jobless recovery – is not a problem associated with collective bargaining. The unions haven’t had big strikes in recent years, nor have they negotiated for big wage gains. The public sector unions have been offering big concessions to state and city governments. What is going on right now is not a response to an economic problem. It’s politics.

If you had the ear of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is pushing a bill to strip public sector unions of their bargaining power through the state legislature, what would you say?

I would say: consider what happened to John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia. When he gained control of both houses of parliament, he did what the governor of Wisconsin seems to want to do: he forced through the legislature (in which his party had a small majority) a policy to radically restrict union activity, with the goal of basically de-legitimising that institution in society. John Howard was thrown out of office in the next election; he even lost his own seat. If you push to undo an institution that is part of the fabric of society, one that many people believe should be available to workers who want it (whether or not they themselves want to be part of it), you might find yourself pushed aside.

Removing collective bargaining from the public sector and lodging all power with employers will not solve the economic problems of U.S. states and cities. It will just remove one mechanism for bringing workers and management in the public sector together to deal with the fiscal problem that neither of them caused.