BOOK REVIEW: "Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States"
by C.M. Lewis
Workers rally for the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009. Source: Flickr.
The seeming resurgence of the labor movement, and the need for structural changes to labor law—and now, the political potential of achieving them—has led to a growth in prescriptions for the movement’s future. Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts and A Collective Bargain have been widely and positively received as blueprints for organized labor; others, such as Shaun Richman’s Tell The Bosses We’re Coming, have also contributed to the discussion of revitalizing the movement internally and on a policy level.
David Madland’s Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States presents an analysis of labor’s decline, and policy prescription for transforming the system of labor relations in the United States. Madland, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, presents a familiar argument: American labor law is broken, and we need to rethink it, and rethink it along sectoral or “broad-based bargaining” lines. Sectoral bargaining has become a popular trend in policy circles, and most platforms issued by Democratic primary contenders in 2020 included reference to sectoral bargaining.
Madland takes a broad approach to defining sectoral bargaining. He points to existing de facto sectoral approaches, such as in the auto industry, as examples of near-sectoral pattern bargaining that is prohibitively difficult to replicate because of policy and legal barriers. Rather than jettison the current system of bargaining, he proposes to layer a sectoral system on top of it, creating an easier pathway to multiemployer agreements and a system of wage boards with representatives of labor, government, and management that would set minimum standards for difficult-to-organize industries like home healthcare.
Madland's second proposal that the government should actively incentivize union membership as a function of public policy, is more unique. To demonstrate an example of this, he points to the Ghent system, named after Ghent, Belgium. Under the Ghent system, unions historically hold a monopoly on the provision of a voluntary system of unemployment compensation. Workers seeking unemployment insurance access it through unions, rather than government unemployment claims. The result: extremely high rates of union membership that have proven more sustainable over time. Replicating such a system in the United States could, he suggests, take the form of “portable benefits” proposals or workforce training.
Madland argues that foundationally, strong labor unions are a question of democracy: an argument with which few in the labor movement would find disagreements. How they serve as guarantors of democracy, however, is a different question. Madland believes that the role of labor unions is as a bulwark of the middle class, creating a mediating class between the elites and—one supposes, though he leaves it unsaid—the working class. A weak middle class, he argues (drawing on Aristotle), leads to class antagonisms, and either power grabs by the rich or “mob role [sic].”
Much of the book is dedicated to demonstrating that the American system is broken, and to defending these two basic propositions—sectoral bargaining and the government incentivizing union membership—as necessary measures to fix labor law in the United States. Madland correctly emphasizes that many proposals addressing the growth of inequality, such as increased taxes for the rich, will not provide a long-term structural fix to the economy absent a revitalization of labor and union bargaining power.
He goes further, and points to reform proposals, such as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, as positive but insufficient to fully change the structural problems in the United States. His comparative evidence for that—such as Canada’s system of labor relations, which is highly similar to what the PRO Act would create—is convincing. Canada, which has a system of labor relations essentially the same as the unamended National Labor Relations Act prior to Taft-Hartley, has higher union density than the United States but has likewise suffered through decades of decline.
However, there are critical flaws that ultimately limit the book’s usefulness and call into question many of its core assumptions.
There are odd choices of framing and presentations of fact throughout the book. As an example, Madland presents organized labor in the United Kingdom as, “fiercely autonomous,” and dubious of state action, ignoring the creation of the Labour Party by the Trades Union Congress in 1900 and the continued formal affiliation of trade unions to the Party. Indeed, British labor unions are formally represented on the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, and UK Labour’s aggressive support for the welfare state and nationalized industries prior to the Thatcher era was strongly reflective of trade union political priorities. They have historically sought to defend their power and workers’ rights through political (and state) action -- so much so that they created one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom.
There are also areas left unaddressed that call into question some of his policy prescriptions. Although Madland is correct that the Ghent system has proven more durable in countries like Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark, it has increasingly declined—and with it union membership—over the past two decades. Governments have ended trade union monopolies on unemployment compensation and introduced alternatives, calling into question whether the Ghent system is truly resistant to the same forces which have led to union decline across the globe, or whether it simply delayed the effects. This question is left unanswered.
Envisioning an American equivalent of the Ghent system based on portable benefits leads to immediate questions. Portable benefits refer to benefits (like health insurance) that travel with the employee and are not connected to the employer: a clear benefit to workers, as they’re no longer tied to employers by their reliance on employer-provided benefits. Madland points to labor-management benefit trusts as an existing system of quasi-portable benefits, such as SAG-AFTRA’s healthcare plan (which has recently suffered through controversy).
He is correct that access to these benefits incentivizes membership; this is clearly demonstrated by the value actors place on SAG-AFTRA membership and entailed access to healthcare. However, closely tying union recruitment strategies to monopolies over benefits creates an incentive to defend their privileges, as well as an inherent tension between union privileges and universal demands. This tension is well demonstrated by Culinary 226’s opposition to “Medicare for All” in the 2020 presidential primary, with damaging consequences that tarnished their image with the wider public.
This isn't simply a speculative consequence of the Ghent system. In some Ghent system nations, left-wing unions advocated for universal social benefits instead of voluntary programs administered by trade unions. They often met fierce opposition from more conservative Christian Democratic trade unions, who supported the system as a preferable alternative to government intervention. The system’s history has been characterized by political questions of universal social benefits, state action, and the broader role of government; its persistence reflects the triumph of a more conservative view of voluntarist social benefits and reduced state action.
Power, politics, and the pushback that can occur through state action is a bitter lesson that organized labor has learned through struggle in the United States, and one which is curiously avoided by Madland. Employers immediately challenged the NLRA as unconstitutional, and were bitterly dragged into the post-NLRA system of labor relations. After a brief pause during the Second World War, Republican control of Congress in 1947 led directly to a legislative offensive against post-NLRA gains in the wake of 1946’s strike wave, setting up the foundation for an altered system of labor relations that slowly withered under legislative and legal attack. Business may not have seen the true benefits for decades, but they never gave up the hope of beating back the NLRA.
This strikes at a crucial point: despite Madland’s view of labor-management partnership (much of his book is spent arguing for cooperation and in an attempt to make a value proposition to capital), there has never been more than a tentative ceasefire between labor and capital in the United States. Whether there is a sectoral approach or a firm-level approach to labor relations is irrelevant to the basic dynamic that has always ruled American labor relations: employers will not cede power voluntarily, and have historically even been willing to defend their power through murderous violence.
American labor relations are notable for the historical intensity of violence and the open cooperation between business and government. Although overt violence has declined as a facet of labor relations in favor of sophisticated union busting, state support is still a major factor in combating unions, like changing traffic lights at the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama. Republican politicians played a key role in defeating the United Auto Workers’ union drive in Chattanooga, Tennessee; indeed, politicians throughout the South have commonly worked closely with businesses to avoid unionization. Open high-level political support for union campaigns has been less common, though it has become more frequent in recent years.
The easy cooperation between business and government cautions against over-relying on external, state-determined mechanisms for our recruitment and organizing. In Ghent system countries, the removal of their monopoly on unemployment compensation has led to declines in membership. Securing a favorable policy environment, as Madland suggests, is desirable, but we should be wary of relying too heavily on specific policies. What can be given can be taken away.
The Thatcher era is particularly illustrative of how the state can turn against labor. Not only did Thatcher’s government wage a scorched earth campaign against government policies supporting organized labor, her government actively weaponized state action against trade unions. The 1984-85 Miners’ strike, which Madland does not mention, is commonly and correctly understood as an outgrowth of deliberate government policy designed to break trade unions. Likewise, Ronald Reagan utilized executive power to launch a withering assault on organized labor: one which set the tone for employers like the Phelps-Dodge company, who recognized that the political winds were in their favor.
There’s admittedly a balance to be struck between ignoring state power, and over-reliance upon it. Far too many unionists make the mistake of ignoring the value of seizing and wielding state power to support organized labor and American workers, relying instead on a romanticized vision of bottom-up direct action. Walter Reuther, although rightly criticized for his intolerance of dissent and autocratic tendencies, was correct that the ballot box is intimately connected to the bread box. If unions ignore the state, the state will be left entirely to their enemies.
However, the opposite extreme—where Madland finds himself—is just as wrong. Madland contraposes “top down” and “bottom up” power, without understanding that “top down” power is secured in direct proportion to organized labor’s “bottom up” power. We secure from the state what concessions we can force through the power built on organized workers, and organized money. By ignoring this, and by focusing on an abstract question of policy regimes and market manipulation at a thousand foot level, Madland erases workers altogether. Ultimately, his vision is one in which unions are free to bargain without the workers, who are merely passive beneficiaries of outcomes determined by the maneuvering of elite actors.
This is the core danger in some proposals for sectoral bargaining, and one which experts have warned against. A joint letter issued by labor economists, lawyers, and scholars cautioned against the “shortcut” of legislating our way to worker power, or through securing benefits through favorable policy without independent power to secure it. As they note, the functional sectoral systems in Europe are all built upon a core bedrock of worker power and the credible threat of labor action. They function because labor is organized, and are an outgrowth of and sustained by that organization. We can’t reverse engineer our way to power.
Madland’s book is fatally weakened by failing to realistically grapple with the reality that a grand bargain between labor and capital is not practical, achievable, or desirable, and that the political environment in the United States has largely favored and continues to favor capital. Clever value propositions and policy proposals will not change the base reluctance of employers to cede control over their workforces or legislate in defiance of their desire to minimize labor costs and maximize profit. He is correct that we should think clearly about policy and take steps to secure favorable policy. However, we should think of it as an outgrowth of independent power, and as functioning toward the end of securing and reproducing that power.
One could be forgiven for reading Madland’s book through the lens of the Andy Stern era of labor-management partnership and “disrupting” unionism, itself an outgrowth out of panic over the unarrested decline of organized labor’s bargaining power and ability to shape the American economy. The energy of the movement is elsewhere: in organizing, in more militant confrontations with management and capital, and in expanding the arsenal of economic weapons available to American workers. There is no “wonk” fix to organizational and political problems, nor will clever policy make our class enemies like us.
A more pessimistic—and perhaps more accurate—read is that there is still a profound difference in how elements within the labor movement view the nature of “The Labor Question,” as well as its answer. With a shift toward a more politically friendly federal government and new-found public cachet for labor unions, holdouts of the Stern-influenced “growth at all cost” school of thought may be tempted to cut deals for short term gain at the expense of long term power. If they do so, we will have squandered a chance to fundamentally reshape the movement and reverse its decline.
It’s easy to tear down ideas—easier still when the ideas are markedly flawed. It’s far harder to offer solutions, or answers to the continual nagging question, “what is to be done?” There are answers to be found, and Madland is correct that sectoral bargaining will and must be part of the solution. Jane McAlevey has offered key thoughts on both sectoral bargaining’s promise—and the mirages offered by employers. Those seeking answers would be better served to look to her, and those aligned with her, to find a map to what the future of bargaining must look like.
C.M. Lewis is an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania.