Deregulating Union Democracy: Creating a Marketplace for Workplace Representation Services
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Description
"No King is as safe in office as a Trade Union Official," so quipped George Bernard Shaw in a 1930 play, The Apple Cart. After forty years of federal guarantees of union democracy under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA or Landrum-Griffin Act), we are no closer to the democratic ideal of active membership involvement and contested elections, let alone two-party systems. Without gainsaying that some improvements may have occurred in some places, I believe it is time to reassess the entire system of regulation of internal union affairs. My argument is that union democracy regulation is both ineffectual and counterproductive, and we should move to a system where the law is indifferent to the form the bargaining agent takes—whether it be democratic or autocratic, nonprofit or for-profit—as long as employees in the bargaining unit have low-cost opportunities to cast secret ballot votes on the economic decisions of critical importance to them. The pursuit of union democracy is ineffectual because we know from decades of research on union member participation in internal union affairs that union members do not treat internal union elections as salient elections requiring a claim on their scarce attention span for matters not directly affecting their material interests. Hence, they do not make the investment in information and attendance at meetings necessary to exercise an informed choice or to participate in a way that would ensure an effective influence. This can also be viewed as a form of "collective action" problem: (i) monitoring union performance and active participation are costly and time-consuming; and (ii) the benefits of improved union performance cannot be confined to those willing to make the investments in monitoring and participation.
Source Publication
The Challenge for Collective Bargaining: Proceedings of the New York University 65th Annual Conference on Labor
Source Editors/Authors
Michael Z. Green
Publication Date
2013
Recommended Citation
Estreicher, Samuel, "Deregulating Union Democracy: Creating a Marketplace for Workplace Representation Services" (2013). Faculty Chapters. 463.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/463
