Person:

Freeman, Richard

China’s emerging labor market was buffeted by changes in demand and supply and institutional changes in the last two decades. Using the Chinese Urban Household Survey data from 1989 to 2009, our study shows that the market responded with substantial changes in the structure of wages and in employment and types of jobs that workers obtained that mirrors the adjustments found in labor markets in advanced economies. However, the one place where the Chinese labor market appears to diverge from the labor markets in advanced countries is the rapid convergence in earnings and occupational positions of cohorts who entered the job market under more or less favorable conditions. On this dimension, China’s labor market seems more flexible than those in other countries. Three related factors may explain this pattern: (1) the rapid growth of China’s economy; (2) the high rate of employee turnover; (3) the relative weakness of internal labor markets in China. Bottom line, the Chinese labor market has responded about as well as one could expect to the changes in the demand and supply factors and institutional shocks in this critical period in Chinese economic history.

The economic position of workers has weakened in much of the advanced world. Over the past 30–40 years the share of national income going to labor has fallen. Labor earnings have become more unequally distributed. The proportion of workers in trade unions has trended downward, accompanied in some countries with commensurate declines in collective bargaining coverage. Union influence on the direction of the economy has diminished even in countries where firms and unions negotiate wage and working conditions for most employees and where left-oriented parties are in government. Increases in government deficits and debt resulting from the Great Recession have induced many governments to introduce austerity policies that are likely to perpetuate high joblessness and inequality into the foreseeable future. Finance's speculative excesses fed market capitalism but much of the costs of the implosion of finance and ensuing Great Recession will fall on labor into the foreseeable future.

There is no easy answer to the title question. As the phrase “if anything” indicates, it is unclear whether labor can rejuvenate itself and pressure societies to restore full employment and raise living standards in the face of inequality and pressures for austerity programs. Differences in the labor relations systems among countries, in levels of inequality, in the importance of money in politics, and in the post Great Recession state of economies will undoubtedly produce different responses across countries and labor movements.

In this paper I examine the situation in the US, where the ability of trade unions to represent labor's interest has declined more than in any other major economy. Collective bargaining in the US is co-terminus with union density. For over half a century union density has fallen in the private sector. In 2012 6.6% of private sector workers were union members (US BLS, 2013, table 3) – below the 1900 level when total density, then based almost entirely on private sector workers, was 6.8% (Freeman, 1998, p 291). In the 2000s unions gained so few members in National Labor Relations Board representation elections or in other ways that the anti-unionists’ once quixotic dream of a union-free labor market has become a reality in the private sector. American labor law and custom makes it difficult for workers and firms to substitute other forms of workplace labor activity for collective bargaining. The law forbids employer-initiated works councils. There are no mechanisms for extending collective contracts beyond the firm and local unions who negotiate and sign a contract. Employer associations are more interested in undermining collective bargaining than in discussing labor issues with the AFL-CIO or some other union federation.

Unionism and collective bargaining have followed a different path in the public sector. Union density increased from the 1960s to the 2000s when about 37% of employees were union members, including teachers, police, firefighters, university professors, graduate student teaching assistants, as well as bus drivers, clerical workers, and so on.1 When recession-induced budget crises hit cities and states in the late 2000s, however, opponents of unions attacked public sector bargaining as a contributing factor to the deficits. In the US federal system, state law governs state and local government collective bargaining. Some states encourage public sector collective bargaining. Other states, largely in the South, make it illegal for public sector employers to bargain with unions.

Following the 2008 elections, Republican-dominated legislatures in several states that had encouraged collective bargaining passed bills to restrict bargaining, outlaw dues checkoffs/agency fees (which provide a funding stream to unions), and limit union political activities. Wisconsin, which had pioneered laws favorable to public sector bargaining, added provisions to its budget bill that effectively eliminated collective bargaining for all state and local workers except police and fire. Ohio enacted legislation of a similar kind that targeted all state and local employees including police and fire. Opponents of the Wisconsin legislation forced the state's governor into a recall election but failed to turn him out of office or reverse the legislative decision. Opponents of the Ohio legislation overturned their law in a referendum (Freeman and Han, 2012), which seemed to stem the anti-union movement. But in 2012 the Republican dominated legislature in historically pro-union Michigan passed a bill to weaken unions there. At this writing anti-union groups have bills pending in the legislatures of many other states. Unions have circled their wagons to defend the one part of the labor market where they still hold considerable sway.

The experience of the US is extreme but nonetheless informative for other advanced countries where crisis-driven austerity and increased inequality weaken union ability to represent workers and may embolden groups opposed to collective action, welfare state protections of workers and the like to follow the lead of their US counterparts. The failure of US unions to develop alternatives to collective bargaining to advance worker interests as union density fell is a “canary in the mine” warning to labor elsewhere. The new efforts by US labor activists, social entrepreneurs, some unions, and in 2013 the AFL-CIO itself to mobilize citizens to defend workers’ interests without collective bargaining directs attention to innovative ways for labor to develop countervailing power and press for full employment and rising living standards for all.

The paper is divided into three sections. Section one reviews the decline in labor as a force determining outcomes in modern capitalism, with particular attention to the collapse of the firm-based collective bargaining model in the US. Section two highlights the need for a strong labor movement to help reform the finance-dominated model of capitalism that underlies the implosion of Wall Street and ensuing economic crisis. Section three examines the ways that labor activists, social entrepreneurs, and unions are developing ways to rejuvenate labor power and improve labor conditions absent collective bargaining. There is a brief conclusion.

Analysts typically see labour institutions in advanced countries as defining the ways in which developing economies can organize their labour markets. International agencies often pose the choice as one between a US-style decentralized market-driven system, or a European Union (EU)-style system in which industrial or regional unions bargain collectively with employer federations to produce agreements that governments may extend to all firms and workers in the sector. This chapter argues that developing country labour markets differ so much from those in advanced countries that developing countries can benefit more from the experience the labour markets in other developing countries rather than from the labour markets of advanced economies. The range and performance of labour institutions among advanced and developing countries is examined. Then China’s labour institutions and labour market reforms are compared to Latin American institutions and reforms.

This paper examines international and domestic collaborations using data from an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in the fields of Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. The data allow us to investigate the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding authors about the collaboration. We have four main findings. First, we find that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities resembling that across countries. Second, face-to-face meetings are important in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Third, the main reason for most collaborations is to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors, but there are substantial differences in the mode of collaborations between small lab-based science and big science, where international collaborations are more prevalent. Fourth, for biotech, we find that citations to international papers are higher compared to papers with domestic collaborators only, but not for the other two fields. Moreover, in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower citations if they were international collaborations. Overall, our findings suggest that all collaborations are best viewed from a framework of collaborations across space broadly, rather than in terms of international as opposed to domestic collaborative activity.

Seven states in the US outlaw public sector collective bargaining, but employees in these states still join unions. Public sector workers join unions in other states even when unions are unable to obtain collective agreements. Using the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group 2001-2010, we estimate union membership wage premium for public sector employees across states with different public sector bargaining laws. We find that unionism is associated with higher earnings even in states that outlaw public sector bargaining. Using the School and Staffing Survey for teachers, we find that a substantial and increasing proportion of school districts reach meet-and-confer agreements with teachers unions and that those agreements are associated with better retirement plans for teachers. The percentage of workers who join unions in a school district is associated with higher earnings and lower contract working days for union members in states that outlaw collective bargaining as well as in states that mandate bargaining, which suggests that density contributes to the success of unions in the absence of collective bargaining.