Unions and Inequality (Sociology)

Introduction

As capitalism spread across Europe and North America over the course of the 19th century, what came to be known as the “labor question” took center stage: how to address the needs of tens of millions of dispossessed workers who were being subjected to inhumane working conditions for poverty wages. For some this was a moral question of right and wrong. For others it was a threat to social stability. For their part, workers themselves advanced their own solution to the labor question by joining labor unions in order to redress the power imbalance between labor and capital, achieve a decent standard of living, and expand notions of democratic and social citizenship. In the ensuing decades, unions became one of the key mechanisms for addressing sources of political and economic inequality. They formed alliances with political parties to push for democratic reforms, and to implement more redistributive social policies. Through negotiations with employers, they raised living standards and improved working conditions. By midcentury, many scholars viewed unions as an indispensable partner in a system of industrial democracy, a means of institutionalizing conflict and ensuring social stability. The postwar period saw a general rise in union strength and a reduction in economic inequality. There was, however, tremendous cross-national diversity in terms of labor policy regimes, party-union alliances, and union strength and influence. This was partly due to external political and economic differences but also due to internal differences in union ideologies and organizing strategies. For example, in some cases unions took divisive approaches that protected the privileges of dominant groups while excluding others, while in others they adopted more inclusive strategies that united diverse groups to fight for greater socioeconomic equality. As unions’ power increased, they were criticized for creating price distortions in labor markets, which critics charged actually increased economic inequality. While such criticisms are debatable, what is not arguable is that unions’ power to have any effect, positive or negative, has declined across Europe and North America. At the same time, economic inequality has increased dramatically. Many researchers see a link between these two trends. What remains unclear is whether and how these trends might be reversed.

Resources

At a basic level, understanding the relationship between unions and inequality starts with gathering and analyzing data on union strength and levels of different types of inequality. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), International Labour Organization (ILO), and Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) all provide a wide variety of by-country data on income, wealth, employment, union membership, inequality, productivity, working conditions, levels of social protection, and more. For income inequality specifically, key data sources include the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research World Income Inequality Database, and the World Wealth and Income Database. Data from the Boix-Miller-Rosato Dichotomous Coding of Democracy, 1800–2010 and Center for Systemic Peace Polity IV Project offer measures of democratization, which can be combined with union data to estimate effects of union strength on levels of political inequality.

Boix-Miller-Rosato Dichotomous Coding of Democracy, 1800–2010.
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For researchers interested in understanding the relation between economic and political inequality, the Boix-Miller-Rosato database provides useful measures of 219 countries’ democracy over more than two centuries. The database uses a dichotomous coding scheme, whereby countries are either democratic or non-democratic, based on measures of political contestation and participation.
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Center for Systemic Peace Polity IV Project.
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For researchers who want a more finely-grained coding of countries’ level of democratization, the Polity IV project measures levels of democratic and autocratic authority for 167 countries between 1800–2013 along a twenty-one-point “Polity Score” scale. The scale moves from –10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (what they term “consolidated democracy”).
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International Labour Organization.
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Contains over a hundred indicators covering more than 230 countries and economies, including data on union density, strikes, employment, poverty, population, and more. The ILO also hosts a wide array of databases that compile legislation, regulations, and standards related to working conditions and human rights.
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Luxembourg Income Study.
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The Luxembourg Income Study compiles and harmonizes microdata from forty-three upper- and middle-income countries, making cross-national comparisons more accurate. Includes key measures of income and wealth inequality, public taxes and transfers, labor market outcome, and more.
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OECD Statistics.
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The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compiles a wide array of economic data for thirty-four developed countries, including information on union density, employment, earnings, employment protections, and more.
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United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research World Income Inequality Database.
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The WIID includes information on income inequality for what it calls “developed, developing, and transition countries.” This includes country-level data on income shares by quintile and decile, Gini coefficients, means and medians, and richest and poorest 5 percent income shares.
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World Bank Data.
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The World Bank collects social and economic data for a much larger group of 218 developed, middle-income, and developing countries. Resources of particular interest to those studying unions and inequality include their Poverty & Equity and ASPIRE Atlas of Social Protection databases.
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World Wealth and Income Database.
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Tracks income and wealth levels for those at the very top of the distribution. This group is often missed by traditional sampling methods. However, as wealth and income become more concentrated at the top, this group is ever more essential for understanding broader trends in economic inequality.
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Journals

Given the centrality of studies of inequality to sociology as a discipline, research on unions and inequality can be found in many of sociology’s leading general journals. In addition to these, the list below includes journals that are more likely to feature research with a more explicit focus on labor unions.

Global Labour Journal.
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Founded in 2010, the Global Labour Journal is the official peer-reviewed journal of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 44 (RC44, Labour and Labour Movements). It publishes three times per year, in January, May, and September and features research on labor movements from a global and transnational perspective.
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Industrial and Labor Relations Review.
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Published by the Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School since its founding in 1947, this is the leading journal for research on work and employment relations.
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Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society.
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Published by the University of California Institute for Research on Labor and Employment since 1961, this is another key journal publishing articles on all aspects of labor and employment relations, with a particular strength in economic approaches.
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Labor Studies Journal.
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Sponsored by the United Association for Labor Education, Labor Studies Journal is a quarterly, multidisciplinary journal founded in 1998. It features research on issues “related to work, workers, labor organizations, and labor studies and worker education in the U.S. and internationally.”
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New Labor Forum: A Journal of Ideas, Analysis, and Debate.
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Founded in 1997 and housed at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, New Labor Forum is published three times per year. It aims to serve as “a place for labor and its allies to test and debate new ideas.” While it is an academic journal, it views its audience more broadly, including labor and community leaders and activists.
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Politics & Society.
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Established in 1970, this is a quarterly, multidisciplinary journal that publishes research that “raises questions about the way the world is organized politically, economically, and socially.” While it has a broad focus on politics, many articles focus on labor unions and class analysis.
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Work, Employment, and Society.
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Sponsored by the British Sociological Association, this is a quarterly journal that focuses on “all forms of work and their relation to wider social processes and structures, and to quality of life.”
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Work & Occupations.
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Published quarterly since 1974, Work and Occupations focuses on workplace dynamics and work-related issues both in the United States and internationally. It often features research on unions.
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Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society.
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Published quarterly since 1997, Working USA bills itself as a “cross-disciplinary social science journal intended for a broad exploration of the economic, political, and social dimensions of work and labor throughout the world.”
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Classic Works

The problem of inequality and its relation to the organization of work traces back to the founders of political economy. Even Smith 2008, held up today as the father of laissez-faire economics, understood the power imbalance inherent in the employment relationship, and its consequences for the distribution of income. Marx 1976 built on this basic insight to develop a systematic theory of the organization of capitalist production. While Marx saw relations of production as fundamentally unequal and exploitative, Durkheim 1984 understood the ever more complex division of labor that characterized modern society as a means of ensuring social cohesion through mutual dependence, with work-based “corporate groups” playing a key role in binding individuals together. For their part, Webb and Webb 1902 saw unions as part of a system of “industrial democracy,” which could counter the inequality between workers and employers. Similarly Commons 1959 and his student Perlman 1928, founders of the “Wisconsin school” of industrial relations, saw employment relations as mutually beneficial but subject to periodic disputes. Their brand of “institutional economics” advocated for creating institutions for channeling and resolving those disputes and advancing more harmonious workplace relations. Writing a few decades later, after unions had established themselves as legitimate economic and political actors in the United States, Olson 1965 analyzed the underlying logic that ensured unions’ ability to operate effectively, focusing on their ability to enforce compulsory membership. Approaching the question from a more historical perspective, Thompson 1963 focused on the means through which early English unions created a sense of common consciousness among disparate groups of workers. Developing a more theoretical critique of Olson 1965, Offe and Wiesenthal 1980 highlighted the class-specific challenges that unions face compared to organizations of employers and emphasized the importance of creating collective identities in order to change workers’ cost-benefit calculus of the risks of taking collective action.

Commons, John R. 1959. Institutional economics: Its place in political economy. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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Elaborates Commons’s theory of industrial relations. While understanding the fundamental inequality between workers and employers, he also saw their common interests, and the benefits of working together to create industrial harmony. But working together required a dense set of institutions to level the playing field between labor and management. Originally published 1934.
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Durkheim, Émile. 1984. The division of labor in society. London: Macmillan.
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Focuses on the role of the division of labor in making societies possible. In an expansive preface to the book’s second edition, Durkheim elaborated on the particular role of work-based corporate groups, which could include unions, in mediating between individuals and the state. Originally published 1893.
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Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. London: Penguin.
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Dissects the dynamics of exploitation inherent in the wage relation, while providing a disputed but influential historical account of the process that led to the establishment of a capitalist free-labor system in Britain. Originally published 1867.
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Offe, Claus, and Helmut Wiesenthal. 1980. Two logics of collective action: Theoretical notes on social class and organizational form. Political Power and Social Theory 1.1: 67–115.
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Starts from the observation that workers and employers are not only unequal in terms of access to economic resources but also in the severity of the obstacles they face in acting collectively to achieve common goals. Offe and Wiesenthal seek to understand the conditions under which workers can overcome those obstacles. They emphasize the importance of (1) creating a collective identity to overcome individual feelings of powerlessness; and (2) changing the calculus by which workers measure the cost or benefit of engaging in potentially risky collective action.
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Olson, Mancur. 1965. The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Chapter 3, “The Labor Union and Economic Freedom,” applies Olson’s classical theory of collective action to the case of unions. In order to accomplish their collective goal of raising living standards for their members, Olson argues that they must enforce compulsory membership, either through violence or regulation, to avoid free riders.
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Perlman, Selig. 1928. A theory of the labor movement. New York: Augustus M. Kelley.
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Argues that workers rationally focus on the issues that most affect their immediate well-being, namely control over their job, wages, and working conditions. According to this approach, the unions’ role was concentrated on addressing these key issues for workers, shorn of broader ideological implications.
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Smith, Adam. 2008. An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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In his foundational inquiry into the drivers of modern capitalist economies, Smith examined the contracting process between workers and their employers, but he understood the competing interests involved, as well as the inherent power imbalance between both parties. Originally Published 1776.
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Thompson, E. P. 1963. The making of the English working class. New York: Vintage.
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Thompson’s detailed social history of early working-class formation in England uncovers the means through which disparate groups of artisans, tradespeople, and factory laborers came to see themselves as part of a unified “working class.” Going beyond the institutional structures of working-class organizations, Thompson zoomed in on the everyday practices and cultural forms that went into creating this collective class consciousness.
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Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. 1902. Industrial democracy. London and New York: Longmans, Green.
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Examines in detail the democratic role that unions play in capitalist societies. As leading members of the socialist Fabian Society, the Webbs sought to rein in the excesses of industrial capitalism they observed in their research.
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The Postwar Period

After decades of violent class conflict in the early 20th century, unions across the capitalist democracies achieved a détente of sorts with management and the state in the decades following the Second World War. Unions traded greater legitimacy, regular wage increases, and social benefits in exchange for recognizing management control of production and restraining more militant elements within their ranks. Combined with the dramatic postwar economic expansion, the result was a substantial drop in economic inequality from the 1940s through the 1970s. Part of this was due to unions’ central role in setting the “standard rate,” as Slichter, et al. 1960 explained. Thinking more broadly, scholars such as Kerr, et al. 1960 in the developing field of industrial relations theorized that this postwar economic order heralded a fundamental shift in class relations. According to what they saw as a “logic of industrialism,” increasing technological and economic development would lead to narrowing socioeconomic differences over time. Dahrendorf 1959 and Bell 1973 developed new ideas about how postwar prosperity had restructured axes of social and political conflict. One of their key insights was that the institutionalization of class conflict had led to the development of increasingly large and powerful bureaucracies. These developed not only in business and government but also within the labor movement as well. Mills and Schneider 1948 examined the negative consequences of this for unions, while Goldfield 1989 showed that the restructuring that Dahrendorf and Bell saw as a consequence of postwar prosperity was more a function of labor unions’ decline. Indeed, as Davis 1986 and Moody 1988 showed, unions’ postwar bureaucratization undermined their ability to counter corporate power and fight for pro-worker political reforms.

Bell, Daniel. 1973. The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York: Basic Books.
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Argues that the shift from manufacturing to service and knowledge work was eroding unions’ traditional base and changing social hierarchies. To remain relevant, unions would have to shift away from “quantitative” demands about wages and benefits to more “qualitative” demands about control over work and greater opportunity for self-actualization.
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Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1959. Class and class conflict in industrial society. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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As greater prosperity narrowed economic differences, Dahrendorf argued that class conflict over control of the means of production had shifted to political conflict over control of the means of authority, particularly administrative bureaucracies. In what he called “post-capitalist” society, unions and employer associations worked together to control workplace conflict.
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Davis, Mike. 1986. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and economy in the history of the U.S. working class. London and New York: Verso.
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In the first half of this collection of essays, Davis offers a sweeping and penetrating analysis of the origins, development, and decline of the US labor movement, from the Jacksonian period to the Reagan era. Throughout he focuses on the dynamics that caused what was initially viewed as among the world’s most militant working classes to end up in a weakened and compromised state. His emphasis is on the negative consequences of the disjuncture between workers’ economic and political organization, particularly what he famously described as the “barren marriage” between labor and the Democratic Party.
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Goldfield, Michael. 1989. The decline of organized labor in the United States. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Goldfield systematically analyzes the competing explanations for the causes of US union decline. He shows that it is the result not of structural changes in the workforce or shifts in social values but rather of a shift in the balance of class forces, with capital reasserting its power over labor.
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Kerr, Clark, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and Charles A. Myers. 1960. Industrialism and industrial man: The problems of labor and management in economic growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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The key theoretical statement on the logic of “industrial society.” Articulates the central idea that economic and technological development would lead to reduced inequality over time. Industrial conflict would continue to exist, but would be managed by an “omnipresent state” under a system of “industrial pluralism.”
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Mills, C. Wright, and Helen Schneider. 1948. The new men of power. Urbana-Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press.
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Mills saw the key social division in postwar society not between labor and capital, but between a highly coordinated “power elite” and the disorganized masses. Although unions were potentially a “power-bloc” counter to this power elite, Mills saw existing unions as junior partners, fully incorporated into the power structure, as he and Helen Schneider detail in this study of the union bureaucracy.
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Moody, Kim. 1988. An injury to all: The decline of American unionism. London and New York: Verso.
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Arguing against the sanguine assessments of a previous generation of industrial relations scholars, Moody argues that the ascendancy of “business unionism” was not a sign of unions “maturing” but was rather the outcome of a political struggle that ultimately weakened unions, leaving them vulnerable to attack when employers went on a counter-offensive beginning in the 1970s.
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Slichter, Sumner H., James J. Healy, and Edward R. Livernash. 1960. The impact of collective bargaining on management. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
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This weighty tome provides a detailed overview of how industrial relations worked in the United States in the postwar period. In particular, it covers unions’ broader wage-setting function, which played a central role in shaping labor markets and levels of inequality prior to the 1980s.
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Unions and Income Inequality

Starting in the mid-1970s, spiraling inflation and stagnant economic growth—called “stagflation”—eroded the postwar Keynesian consensus. Employers grew more aggressive, and union membership began to decline. At the same time, the trend of reduced economic inequality that characterized the decades since the Great Depression began to reverse, and inequality began to grow. Some scholars like Friedman and Friedman 1979 took a positive view of these changes and argued that unions’ rigid wage-setting practices had created distortions in the labor market that had contributed to the economic crisis of the 1970s. Weaker unions, they argued, would spur economic growth and lead to greater prosperity for all, even if some benefited more than most. Many scholars, however, viewed the trend of growing inequality with alarm and sought to understand its causes. Freeman and Medoff 1984 challenged the idea that unions harmed economic growth and argued that they remained important for reducing inequality. Western and Rosenfeld 2011 and Rosenfeld 2014 showed that union decline has played a key role in the growing wage inequality of recent decades in the United States. Other scholars established a similar relationship for a wider array of countries (Wallerstein 1999; Hayter and Weinberg 2011). Kristal 2010 showed that the decline in working-class bargaining power has decreased the overall share of national income accruing to labor (as opposed to capital) across the capitalist democracies.

Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. 1979. Free to choose: A personal statement. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
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Provides an accessible summary of Friedman’s neo-classical economic view of unions’ economic role, particularly the idea that they artificially distort labor markets, increase economic inequality, and harm economic growth.
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Freeman, Richard B., and James L. Medoff. 1984. What do unions do? New York: Basic Books.
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Rebuts the idea that unions harm the economy and society more broadly. Argues that unions reduce inequality, while creating a “collective voice” that can pressure employers to adopt better management and personnel policies. This in turn can reduce turnover and improve worker productivity, leading to healthier economic growth.
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Hayter, Susan, and Bradley Weinberg. 2011. Mind the gap: Collective bargaining and wage inequality. In The role of collective bargaining in the global economy. Edited by Susan Hayter, 136–186. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
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Provides a useful current overview of the literature on the relation between union strength and levels of wage inequality across advanced capitalist democracies since the 1970s.
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Kristal, Tali. 2010. Good times, bad times: Postwar labor’s share of national income in capitalist democracies. American Sociological Review 75.5: 729–763.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122410382640Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Methodically shows that labor’s share of national income across sixteen industrialized democracies increased from the 1960s through the 1980s but has declined ever since. Kristal attributes the shift to a decline in working-class bargaining power.
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Rosenfeld, Jake. 2014. What unions no longer do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674726215Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Synthesizes Rosenfeld’s extensive work on unions and inequality across a range of dimensions. In addition to a chapter on wage inequality, this book also highlights unions’ roles in reducing racial wage gaps, incorporating immigrants, and fostering greater political participation.
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Wallerstein, Michael. 1999. Wage-setting institutions and pay inequality in advanced industrial societies. American Journal of Political Science 43.3: 649.
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Examines the factors driving wage inequality across a set of sixteen OECD countries. Wallerstein’s results highlight the importance of wage-setting institutions, with strength of unions and collective bargaining being some of the most important.
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Western, Bruce, and Jake Rosenfeld. 2011. Unions, norms, and the rise in U.S. wage inequality. American Sociological Review 76.4: 513–537.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122411414817Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Systematically shows the key role that union decline has played in increasing wage inequality in the United States since 1973. Their key finding is that union decline accounts for between one-fifth and one-third of the growth in inequality between 1973 and 2007. They attribute this to unions’ role in institutionalizing “norms of equity” in the labor market.
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Unions, Inequality, and Social Policy

While much research has focused specifically on unions’ effects on wage inequality, at a broader level they play a key role in shaping dynamics of social and political power. As Rueschemeyer, et al. 1992 showed, unions have played an historically central role in expanding political democracy, while Ahmed 2013 demonstrated that states’ electoral systems were designed to fend off the “existential threat” that mobilized workers posed to existing elites. Esping-Andersen 1990 highlights unions’ central role in shaping social policy, through their efforts to “decommodify” labor. However, as Marks’ analysis showed, different unions have played different political roles, depending on the country and type of industry in which they operate (Marks 1989). Thelen 2001 approached the relation of unions and politics from the opposite direction, arguing that states’ institutional arrangements and employer strategies shape unions’ ability to win gains and shape labor markets. Western’s research showed that national institutional environments also shape unions’ overall prevalence and economic power (Western 1997).

Ahmed, Amel. 2013. Democracy and the politics of electoral system choice: Engineering electoral dominance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Ahmed’s analysis of early democratization in the 19th and early 20th centuries shows that, even as they expanded the franchise, states designed electoral systems to provide safeguards against the “existential threat” that mobilized workers potentially posed to ruling elites.
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Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Esping-Andersen’s canonical study of variation in welfare state policies across modern capitalist democracies finds that unions and labor parties play a key role in “decommodifying” labor, which results in more expansive and inclusive social policies.
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Marks, Gary W. 1989. Unions in politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1515/9781400860159Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Building from a cross-national comparative case study of printing and coal mining unions in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, Marks’ classic text examines the factors driving variation in unions’ political strategies.
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Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist development and democracy. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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In this massive study of democratic development in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean over more than a century, one of the authors’ key findings is that the working class and its organizations—labor unions and labor parties—have played a central role in advancing democratization and expanding political rights.
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Thelen, Kathleen A. 2001. Varieties of labor politics in the developed democracies. In Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Edited by Peter A. Hall and David W Soskice, 71–103. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Where Esping-Andersen focuses on unions and left parties, Thelen focuses on government bureaucracies and employers. She argues that unions’ economic position is fundamentally shaped by the structure of state institutions and employer strategies.
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Western, Bruce. 1997. Between class and market: Postwar unionization in the capitalist democracies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Documents the postwar rise and then more recent decline of labor unions across capitalist democracies. Attributes differing union growth patterns to differences in (1) working-class political strength, (2) collective bargaining centralization, and (3) provision of unemployment insurance.
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Union Politics and Strategy

Fundamentally, unions shape levels of inequality by giving workers a mechanism to band together and exercise power that they lack as individuals. But this power is subject to numerous constraints and takes different shapes depending on both external factors, such as economic conditions and industry structures, as well as internal factors, such as union leadership, structure, and organizing philosophy. Michels 1915 was among the first to recognize workers’ organizational challenges as he developed his “iron law of oligarchy.” But as Offe and Wiesenthal 1980 countered, those challenges shape (but do not determine) unions’ behavior. Voss and Sherman 2000 specified the conditions under which unions could break Michels’s “iron law.” Much of their focus was on the actions of union leadership, which also concerns Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003 as well as Ahlquist and Levi 2013. The former showed how Communist leadership in the US Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union federation led to greater internal democracy and stronger contracts with employers. The latter compared more radical and conservative US unions to understand the conditions under which unions can get members to support measures that do not benefit them directly, even though they benefit the greater good. Kimeldorf 1988 explored the cultural and structural factors that shape unions’ actions, while Ganz 2010 highlighted the role of leadership strategy and resourcefulness in driving union renewal. Kay 2011 focused on the paradoxical role that external challenges such as globalization can play in shaping union strategy. Cornfield 1991 offered a useful overview of how unions have developed over the past century and its consequences for inequality and politics.

Ahlquist, John S., and Margaret Levi. 2013. In the interest of others: Organizations and social activism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1515/9781400848652Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Specifies how organizations can get members to act in ways that do not directly benefit them. Highlights the importance of activist union leadership’s ability to “deliver the goods” for members while fighting for broader issues, as well as the existence of union governance institutions that coordinate members’ actions around an activist program.
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Cornfield, Daniel B. 1991. The U.S. labor movement: Its development and impact on social inequality and politics. Annual Review of Sociology 17.1: 27–49.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.17.080191.000331Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Provides a useful overview of the main theories explaining unions’ ideological and organizational development and how they have affected social inequality.
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Ganz, Marshall. 2010. Why David sometimes wins: Leadership, organization, and strategy in the California farm worker movement. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Ganz’s detailed study of the rise of the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement in the 1960s highlights the role that leadership strategy and resourcefulness can play in outmaneuvering more powerful, better-resourced opponents.
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Kay, Tamara. 2011. NAFTA and the politics of labor transnationalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511778858Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kay examines the effect of NAFTA, a key emblem of globalization, on labor union strategy in North America. Counter to expectations that NAFTA would undermine union power and foment nationalist intra-class division, Kay shows that it bolstered cross-border solidarity and provoked a more internationalist shift in union strategy.
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Kimeldorf, Howard. 1988. Reds or rackets? The making of radical and conservative unions on the waterfront. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Focuses on the roles of different immigrant communities and the different structure of the longshore industry on the US East and West Coasts of to explain the radicalism of the West Coast longshore union and the conservatism of its East Coast counterpart.
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Michels, Robert. 1915. Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. New York: Hearst’s International Library.
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A seminal early study of the effects of bureaucracy on working-class political organization. Michels saw that party leadership came to place organizational preservation over the furtherance of organizational goals. This led to a hierarchical separation between the leadership/staff and the membership; this is what Michels termed the “iron law of oligarchy.”
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Offe, Claus, and Helmut Wiesenthal. 1980. Two logics of collective action: Theoretical notes on social class and organizational form. Political Power and Social Theory 1.1: 67–115.
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Shows that the power imbalance between labor and capital creates greater barriers to collective action for workers than for employers. Then, articulates a “sociological theory of opportunism,” specifying the conditions under which union leaders are more likely to pursue short-term tactical gains even at the expense of long-term strategic goals.
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Stepan-Norris, Judith, and Maurice Zeitlin. 2003. Left out: Reds and America’s industrial unions. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Highlights the importance of unions’ political orientation in creating more powerful organizations. Shows that the Communist-led unions were both more democratic than their non-Communist counterparts and better able to win material gains for their members.
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Voss, Kim, and Rachel Sherman. 2000. Breaking the iron law of oligarchy: Union revitalization in the American labor movement. American Journal of Sociology 106.2: 303–349.
DOI: 10.1086/316963Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Taking aim at Michels, this is a comparative study of union locals that successfully changed their organizational goals and tactics and those that failed. Highlights three key factors: political crisis within the local, the presence of leaders with outside activist experience, and an international union committed to organizational innovation.
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Strikes and Union Power

Traditionally, the method unions have used to achieve gains and reduce inequality has been the strike (i.e., organizing workers to withhold their labor). But the conditions under which workers strike, and the factors enabling or constraining their ability to do so, have varied considerably across countries and over time. Edwards 1981 wrote the classic descriptive study of strikes in the US, while Shorter and Tilly 1974, a book on strikes in France, was also an early effort to catalog cross-country variation in the shape of strikes. Kerr and Siegel 1954 proposed a general theory of the propensity to strike, while Korpi and Shalev 1979 and Perrone, et al. 1984 theorized about the conditions driving cross-national variations in industrial conflict. Friedman 1988, a comparison of union strategy in the United States and France, focused on the factors necessary to win strikes. While he focused on the role of union ideology in determining union success, Kimeldorf 2013 emphasized the importance of workers’ “replacement costs,” the difficulty of replacing them during a strike. Silver 2003 and its systematic analysis of global industrial conflict since 1870 showed that resistance to capital tended to follow capital around the globe as it expanded. Focusing on the United States, Wallace, et al. 1999 showed that strikes have played a declining role in improving workers’ standard of living in recent years. Rosenfeld’s more recent analysis showed that the decline in strikes has been accompanied by wage stagnation for workers (Rosenfeld 2006).

Edwards, P. K. 1981. Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974. New York: St. Martin’s.
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A detailed analysis of historical trends in the size, frequency, and duration of strikes in the United States.
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Friedman, Gerald. 1988. Strike success and union ideology: The United States and France, 1880–1914. Journal of Economic History 48.1: 1–25.
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700004125Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the relation between strike strategy and union ideology. French unions pursued mass mobilization strategies to involve state officials and win strikes, while US unions avoided state involvement by financially supporting smaller groups of strategically placed workers. This resulted in more radical French union ideologies and more conservative US ideologies.
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Kerr, Clark, and Abraham Siegel. 1954. The interindustry propensity to strike: An international comparison. In Industrial conflict. Edited by Arthur W. Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur M. Ross. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Kerr and Siegel’s classic study argued that strike rates would be higher in industries where workers were more likely to be geographically or socially isolated and more cohesive or homogeneous.
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Kimeldorf, Howard. 2013. Worker replacement costs and unionization origins of the U.S. labor movement. American Sociological Review 78.6: 1033–1062.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122413509627Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Identifies the conditions that historically led to union organizing success or failure. Unions were more successful where workers had more leverage due to the difficulty of replacing them during a strike. Three key factors shaped worker replacement costs: scarce skilled labor, geographically isolated worksites, and work that involved time-sensitive tasks.
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Korpi, Walter, and Michael Shalev. 1979. Strikes, industrial relations and class conflict in capitalist societies. British Journal of Sociology 30.2: 164–187.
DOI: 10.2307/589523Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Theorizes the causes and nature of industrial conflict. Against theories of industrial pluralism held over from the postwar period, which posited depoliticized negotiations between relatively equal parties, they recognize the inherent power imbalance between labor and capital, as well as the politicized nature of industrial conflict.
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Perrone, Luca, Erik Olin Wright, and Larry J. Griffin. 1984. Positional power, strikes and wages. American Sociological Review 49.3: 412–426.
DOI: 10.2307/2095284Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Proposes a means of identifying different groups of workers’ structural and disruptive power, and their effect on wages. Shows that the propensity to strike will be low when workers’ positional power is too low or too high. When both are evenly matched, tests of strength will be most likely to occur.
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Rosenfeld, Jake. 2006. Desperate measures: Strikes and wages in post-accord America. Social Forces 85.1: 235–265.
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2006.0140Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Documents the precipitous decline in strike frequency since the 1980s, finding that strikes are no longer able to increase workers’ pay.
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Shorter, Edward, and Charles Tilly. 1974. Strikes in France 1830–1968. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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The latter chapters of Shorter and Tilly’s book are an effort to map cross-national variation in strikes, comparing their size, frequency, and duration.
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Silver, Beverly J. 2003. Forces of labor: Workers’ movements and globalization since 1870. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511615702Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Theorizes the nature and scope of industrial conflict since the late 19th century. Argues that worker unrest drove capitalists to reorganize production and spread it around the world, while the spread of capitalist production in turn stoked worker unrest.
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Wallace, Michael, Kevin T. Leicht, and Lawrence E. Raffalovich. 1999. Unions, strikes, and labor’s share of income: A Quarterly analysis of the United States, 1949–1992. Social Science Research 28.3: 265–288.
DOI: 10.1006/ssre.1999.0647Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows the changing relationship between strikes, unionization, and labor’s share of income in the decades since the end of the Second World War. Whereas strikes and unionization helped to shift the income share in labor’s favor in the postwar decades, that effect has weakened considerably in more recent decades.
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Race, Gender, and Immigration

While unions are traditionally associated with class power and income levels, they also powerfully shape and are shaped by inequalities based on race, gender, citizenship status, and more. Unions have had a complex relationship with race, gender, and national origin. At times they have served to establish and reinforce hierarchies based on race, gender, and national origin that have protected white male members while excluding women, immigrants, and people of color. At other times they have fought for broader, more inclusive policies that have reduced such inequalities. Bonacich 1972 and Hartmann 1976 represent early efforts to theorize the problematic relations between race and class and gender and class, respectively. Acker 2006 is an articulation of more contemporary theorizations of these relations, which focus on the “intersectionality” of race, gender, and class inequality. McCall’s study is an in-depth analysis of the intersectional nature of inequality in the United States (McCall 2001), while Colgan and Ledwith’s edited volume offers a more global perspective (Colgan and Ledwith 2002). Glenn 2009 and Milkman 2007 offer historical and contemporary analyses of how US labor unions approach issues of racial and gender equity, while Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2012 and Sites and Parks 2011 provide statistical analyses of the relation between unions and racial wage inequality in the United States. As for labor and immigration, Mink 1986 explores the exclusionary attitudes of the early AFL, while Olzak 1989 focuses on the effects of simultaneous union growth and immigration on ethnic violence, particularly against African Americans. Castles and Kosack 1973 showcases the central role of immigrant workers in shaping the class structure of their European host countries, while Adler, et al. 2014 provides a more up-to-date analysis of unions’ global efforts to organize immigrant workers and fight growing inequality. For the United States, Milkman 2006, a case study of immigrant worker organizing in Los Angeles, provides broader lessons for union renewal. Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009 offers a systematic analysis of unions’ role in shaping labor market relations for immigrant and non-immigrant Hispanic workers.

Acker, Joan. 2006. Inequality regimes gender, Class, and race in organizations. Gender & Society 20.4: 441–464.
DOI: 10.1177/0891243206289499Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Theorizes how inequalities intersect and are reproduced within organizations, including unions. Acker proposes the idea of “inequality regimes” and examines how inequality regimes can vary across organizations and how they might change.
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Adler, Lee H., Maite Tapia, and Lowell Turner, eds. 2014. Mobilizing against inequality: Unions, immigrant workers, and the crisis of capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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This wide-ranging collection of case studies showcases union efforts at responding to growing inequality around the world, as well as the key role of immigrant workers in this “counter-movement” process.
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Bonacich, Edna. 1972. A theory of ethnic antagonism: The split labor market. American Sociological Review 37.5: 547–559.
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Posits that ethnic divisions flare up when labor markets are split along ethnic lines. In a three-way conflict, capital seeks to replace higher-paid with lower-paid labor, while members of the higher-paid ethnic group tend to protect their wage advantage by developing exclusion movements (including unions), or caste systems.
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Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. 1973. Immigrant workers and class structure in western Europe. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This widely cited (albeit dated) work provides an encyclopedic analysis of the structural dynamics facing immigrant workers in Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Beyond cataloguing the myriad challenges that most immigrant workers face in the labor market, the authors show that immigrant workers play a central role in shaping the class structures of the host societies.
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Colgan, Fiona, and Sue Ledwith, eds. 2002. Gender, Diversity, and Trade Unions: International Perspectives. London: Routledge.
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This edited volume offers a series of useful case studies from a wide variety of countries around the world, each detailing the contemporary challenges that unions face in addressing issues of gender and racial inequality.
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Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2009. Unequal freedom: How race and gender shaped American citizenship and labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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A detailed excavation of the troubled historical relation between race, gender, and citizenship, both in and outside of labor unions, in the United States.
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Hartmann, Heidi. 1976. Capitalism, patriarchy, and job segregation by sex. Signs 1.3: 137–169.
DOI: 10.1086/493283Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that gender-based job segregation is a primary mechanism for reproducing and enforcing male domination over women in capitalist societies. Drawing on British and US history, Hartmann shows how unions often worked to prevent women from entering into certain trades or how they excluded women from the labor market altogether.
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McCall, Leslie. 2001. Complex inequality: Race, class, and gender in the new economy. New York and London: Routledge.
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A detailed empirical analysis of the intersection of race, class, and gender-based inequalities in the contemporary United States. Focuses on the contradictory role of unions in sometimes reproducing and reinforcing gender and racial inequality, while fighting against it at other times.
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Milkman, Ruth. 1987. Gender at work: The dynamics of job segregation by sex during World War II. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
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A classic study of gender dynamics in the US labor movement during the Second World War.
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Milkman, Ruth. 2006. LA story: Immigrant workers and the future of the U.S. labor movement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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Milkman’s case study of Los Angeles focuses on the central role that immigrant workers have played in reshaping both the labor market and the labor movement in that city. From there, she draws lessons from labor’s revitalization in Los Angeles that could be applied to labor renewal projects more broadly.
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Milkman, Ruth. 2007. Two worlds of unionism: Women and the new labor movement. In The sex of class: Women transforming American labor. Edited by Dorothy Sue Cobble, 63–80. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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A study of what Milkman calls the “two worlds of unionism” in the contemporary US labor movement: on the one hand, unions’ role as a powerful tool for addressing gender discrimination; on the other hand, unions’ role in excluding women and perpetuating gender inequality.
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Mink, Gwendolyn. 1986. Old labor and new immigrants in American political development: Union, party, and state, 1875–1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Traces unions’ contemporary weakness to the ascendancy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the late 19th century, which ensured the dominance of an exclusionary, racist approach to new immigrants. This divided the labor movement and left it more vulnerable to anti-union attacks.
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Olzak, Susan. 1989. Labor unrest, immigration, and ethnic conflict in urban America, 1880–1914. American Journal of Sociology 94.6: 1303–1333.
DOI: 10.1086/229156Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows that while waves of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries increased labor market competition at a time of union growth, the labor market pressure was usually taken out on black workers, who bore the brunt of ethnic hostilities.
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Rosenfeld, Jake, and Meredith Kleykamp. 2009. Hispanics and organized labor in the United States, 1973 to 2007. American Sociological Review 74.6: 916–937.
DOI: 10.1177/000312240907400604Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
As with their analysis of labor and African American workers (listed below), Rosenfeld and Kleykamp show that Hispanic workers are relatively more likely to join unions than non-Hispanics, although this is more the case for non-immigrant Hispanics. However, given overall low rates of unionization, unions are less able to play their historic role of assimilating new groups of immigrant workers and raising their living standards.
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Rosenfeld, Jake, and Meredith Kleykamp. 2012. “Organized labor and racial wage inequality in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 117.5: 1460–1502.
DOI: 10.1086/663673Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows that unions reduce racial wage inequality, not just inequality overall, meaning that union decline has had disproportionately negative effects on African-Americans.
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Sites, William, and Virginia Parks. 2011. What do we really know about racial inequality? Labor markets, politics, and the historical basis of black economic fortunes. Politics and Society 39.1: 40–73.
DOI: 10.1177/0032329210394998Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues against the notion that racial wage and employment gaps are attributable to economic restructuring and changing skill demands. Rather, the authors argue that political and institutional factors such as social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns better account for racial wage and employment gaps.