Why Workers Still Need a Collective Voice in the Era of Norms and Mandates
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Description
The drastic decline of union representation in the United States has opened up a large and by now familiar “representation gap” in the workplace—a gap between “what workers want,” to cite Freeman and Rogers’ (1999) important book on the question, and what they have by way of voice at work. But what workers want does not necessarily command the attention of policymakers. Is workers’ desire for greater voice at work any more compelling than their desire for higher wages, paid vacations, or any number of terms and conditions of employment that are left almost entirely to the tender mercies of labor markets and individual bargaining? On some accounts, workers no longer need collective representation (whether or not they want it) because their interests are adequately protected by a combination of legally enforceable mandates and self-enforcing norms. I will argue in this chapter that these accounts are wrong and workers are right: most workers not only want but need some form of collective representation in order to enforce the mix of legal mandates and informal norms by which they are currently governed at work. The existing patchwork of employment mandates has indeed supplied what some commentators view as a kind of union substitute. But minimum standards are often quite minimal, and are underenforced in many workplaces. The default regime of individual contract thus continues to exert a powerful gravitational pull on actual wages and working conditions both above and below the mandatory floor. The nature of the individual employment contract in the non-union sector has also changed since the 1930s, and on some views has created a different kind of union substitute: a regime of non-legally enforceable yet mostly self-enforcing norms that have displaced the arbitrary and harsh labor management practices that drove many workers in the past to demand union representation. But the informal enforcement of workplace norms depends on “reputational sanctions” that are certain to vary across employers and across different classes of workers, leaving many workers vulnerable to unfair and opportunistic employer practices. So workers not only still want collective representation at work; they need collective representation to enforce the regime of mandates and norms by which most workers are actually governed at work. But both the nature of the collective representation that workers need and the path by which they might achieve it differ for workers at the top and the bottom of the labor market.
Source Publication
Research Handbook on the Economics of Labor and Employment Law
Source Editors/Authors
Cynthia L. Estlund, Michael L. Wachter
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Estlund, Cynthia, "Why Workers Still Need a Collective Voice in the Era of Norms and Mandates" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 439.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/439
