The current legislative initiative by organized labor seeks to allow union certification without secret ballots elections. If enough workers sign the cards after helpful guidance from their big, burly colleagues who support certification, then certification would take place.
George McGovern (!) summarizes the case against from the left here.
It seems to me that if this is the best that organized labor can come up with as a policy initiative, they are in a sorry state indeed. It is ripe for parody and not very subtle in the way it tilts the field in favor of the unions.
The study of trade unions has largely disappeared from labor economics as unions have faded out (in the private sector anyway) in the US and Canada. Even European labor economists do not write about them much anymore. This seems to me too bad in a couple of senses. First, I think there is a lot of interesting research to be done, both theoretical and empirical, on public sector unions, which continue to flourish. Second, I think there is work to be done thinking about the role of unions (or the lack thereof) in the decay of the U.S. auto and steel industries and in the remarkably long transition period to a new equilibrium in the airline industry following deregulation. I suspect that both equilibrium models that incorporated unions and behavioral economic models in this area would yield new and useful insights.
Who was my favorite student this term?
7 years ago
