Jake Rosenfeld

Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education.

Desperate Measures: Strikes and Wages in Post-Accord America

Using previously unreleased data on nearly every authorized work stoppage that occurred between 1984 and 2002, this paper tests whether the positive wage-strike relationship held following the breakdown of the post-war labor-capital accord. Unlike in decades past, these findings indicate a complete decoupling of the wage-strike relationship. Even in those industries and regions where unions remain relatively institutionalized, strikes no longer increase aggregate worker pay. Strike activity also fails to narrow worker wage dispersion at the industry-region level. The findings highlight the need for rethinking existing theoretical models on strike activity and wages in this era of capital dominance.

Organized Labor and Racial Wage Inequality in the United States

Why have African-American private-sector unionization rates surpassed those of white workers for decades, and how has private-sector union decline exacerbated black-white wage inequality? Using data from the Current Population Survey (1973–2007), the authors show that African-Americans join unions for protection against discriminatory treatment in nonunion sectors. A model-predicted wage series also shows that, among women, black-white weekly wage gaps would be between 13% and 30% lower if union representation remained at high levels. The effect of deunionization on racial wage inequality for men is less substantial, but without deunionization, weekly wages for black men would be an estimated

Hispanics and Organized Labor in the United States, 1973 to 2007

49 higher. The results recast organized labor as an institution vital for its economic inclusion of African-American men and women. This study points to the need to move beyond class-based analyses of union decline to an understanding of the gendered role unions once played in mitigating racial inequality.

The Power of Transparency Evidence from a British Workplace Survey

Prior research finds that minority populations in the United States secure union employment as part of the process of economic incorporation. Yet little work systematically tests whether this pattern holds for the nations largest minority, Hispanics, during recent decades of union decline. After juxtaposing traditional labor market position theories of unionization with solidaristic accounts, we use 1973 to 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) data to provide the most comprehensive analysis of Hispanics and organized labor in the United States to date. We disaggregate the Hispanic population by citizenship, nationality, and time since arrival to uncover subpopulation differences in the odds of union membership. Additional analyses take advantage of the CPS structure to target individuals who join a union, allowing us to test whether organized labors much-publicized efforts to incorporate recent immigrants have resulted in detectable gains. Consistent with solidaristic accounts of labor organization, results suggest that certain Hispanic subpopulations—especially those born in the United States and immigrants who have secured citizenship—have higher unionization odds and join unions at higher rates than do U.S.-born whites, even after controlling for traditional positional accounts of labor organization. However, the large substantive effects of positional variables, such as sector, occupation, and firm size, indicate that organized labors revival depends on more than any one groups capacity for collective action.

Immigration, organization, and the Great recession: structural change or continuity?

Does the dissemination of organizational financial information shift power dynamics within workplaces, as evidenced by increasing workers’ wages? That is the core question of this investigation. We utilize the 2004 and 2011 series of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) to test whether employees who report that their managers disclose workplace financial data earn more than otherwise similar workers not privy to such information. Our findings suggest that disclosure results in higher wages for workers after adjusting for profit and productivity levels and a range of other workplace and worker characteristics. We estimate that workers who report their managers are “very good” at sharing organizational financial information outearn those who report their managers are “very poor” at financial disclosure by between 8 and 12 percent. We argue that disclosure is a key resource that reduces information asymmetries, thereby providing legitimacy to workers’ claims in wage bargaining. More broadly, our focus on managerial transparency and its effects on worker earnings reveals a largely ignored characteristic of modern workplaces that has implications for contemporary trends in inequality and wage stagnation in Great Britain and other liberal market economies.

Unequal Pay, Unequal Work

Catron’s comment extends our 2009 ASR article, “Hispanics and Organized Labor in the United States, 1973 to 2007,” by analyzing CPS data through the Great Recession. He finds that Hispanic immigrants’ odds of union membership declined relative to nonimmigrant whites between 2007 and 2009, and that certain Hispanic immigrant subcategories displayed increased odds of leaving union jobs during the recent recession. Catron interprets these results as revealing a strong business cycle component to the more general relationship between immigrants and labor organizing that we report, and suggests his findings partially undercut “the hopes of those who view immigrants as the key to organized labor’s future and organized labor as the key to immigrant prosperity” (p. 315).

Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers

Ruth Milkman’s four decades of scholarship stands as an important exception to rising pessimism in the social sciences, as evidenced throughout her new collection of writings, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality, despite the clear moral commitment she brings to her scholarship, and the obvious inequities that remain between men and women in the workplace. As a result, readers are treated to a story of halting progress for women in the workforce, a march punctuated by setbacks, false starts, and abandonment by purported allies. But the broad story throughout these chapters is one of advancement. It is a fascinating and timely set of articles.Jake Rosenfeld reviews On Gender, Labor, and Inequality by Ruth Milkman.

Quixote's Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social PolicyQuixote's Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy, by StoeszDavid. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. 264 pp.

Perhaps it is the C. Wright Mills legacy, run through forty-some years of my teaching Introduction to Sociology, contrasting ‘‘troubles’’ with ‘‘issues,’’ biography with history, but I find myself particularly intrigued when a sociologist turns to (auto)biography. And not just any sociologist. This is Peter Berger who, along with Thomas Luckmann, changed my life and made me who I am— or at least let me understand who I am. I took my undergraduate theory class in the summer of my freshman year. And after reading Berger’s biography, I was shocked to learn that was just three years after Berger and Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality. I still own that book; it is one of the few ‘‘theory’’ books that made the cut when I downsized my library to an apartment from a big house. That copy of The Social Construction of Reality, with its highlighting, underlining, exclamation points and scribbles all over the margins, is the document of my birth as a sociologist. So this is the most intimidating book review I have ever faced. I know just about nothing about the sociology of religion, nothing about many of the areas in which Berger has worked and published. I am, as almost anyone would be, impressed with his long list of books, the many areas in which he has worked and contributed, all around the world. A review of his work requires a group effort, just the kind of research group he himself has been so successful at convening. Berger’s tone, the engaging humor, reminds me of one of my elderly uncles. He describes his arrival at the New School to learn sociology as a kind of accident, not realizing how totally marginal it was to mainstream American sociology, offering us the old Jewish joke about the Chinese waiter speaking Yiddish. When a customer is surprised, the owner hushes him: ‘‘He thinks he’s learning English!’’ And we’re off—I am listening to one of my beloved uncles. As he recounts his extraordinarily productive life, I am sometimes in awe, but much as with my uncles, sometimes wincing with embarrassment. This is, as titled, a book of Berger’s adventures as a sociologist, not an autobiography of his life in full. A first marriage comes and goes in a sentence—his children do the same. Brigitte Berger, his wife, does show up now and again throughout the book, but his family life is dismissed with this reference to his early years at the Hartford Seminary Foundation: ‘‘The Hartford years were biographically important both personally and intellectually. I started life with Brigitte, and our two sons were born there.’’ He continues with a sentence or two on her writing, and his own leaving behind of neoorthodox theology and coming to ‘‘liberal Lutheranism’’ (p. 77). Berger spends some time explaining that his religious life is a very important part of who he is, but separate from his life as a sociologist, using as one of many Jewish references (those of us who did not follow his work in the sociology of religion can be forgiven for having thought he was Jewish): a Weberian notion of kosher cooking, keeping fleshy science separate from milky religion. I can respect and appreciate that, both the separation and the places where the separation utterly falls apart. What is most interesting is that it really does not even occur to him that other parts of his life/identity may be worth attending to in his intellectual development. He is, after all, a white man—and I gather that that identity and its privilege do not strike him as noteworthy. Berger was one of the gods of my life, but like many others, he crashes when feminism comes in. His tales of ‘‘militant feminists’’ in a chapter (wince) called ‘‘Politically Incorrect Excursions’’ all but breaks my heart. Militant? As one of my friends asked when

35.00 cloth. ISBN: 0195181204.

tiveness of an anti-welfare politics of race. Reese’s arguments here draw primary sources from media and administrative and legislative records to document the conservative and racist motives of “Talmadge faction” Democrats and the influence of large farmers on county welfare boards and statewide welfare initiatives in Georgia, and by contrast, the influence of a “three party” system, including liberal Democrats, in Kentucky. She compares the effectiveness of welfare versus old-age pension restriction proposals to show the cross-class sources of this particular policy incursion. California’s significant large farm sector and rural legislators constituted an effective anti-welfare force, but with few black and Latina mothers on welfare, and a denser array of urban interest groups, racist images did not significantly thematize welfare restriction efforts in the fifties. New York’s urban networks of welfare officials, private social services agencies, and organized labor even more effectively defended New Deal programs against upstate farm and business interests. The postwar welfare debates and restrictive policies that Reese analyzes were the roots of backlash politics that revived in the sixties after the expansion of welfare rolls under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the War on Poverty and Great Society programs, and the Civil Rights and black power movements. Reese details the unsuccessful politics of guaranteed income proposals that had both liberal and conservative origins. She sees the subverted promise that would have inhered in a policy precedent of universal welfare support (here, Reese notes the diverse sources of opposition to Nixon’s Family Assistance Plans, but may underemphasize the effect on northern Democrats of opposition by the National Welfare Rights Organization). Instead, a welfare system that segregated single mothers from the rest of the working poor stood ripe for targeting by the escalating backlash that culminated in the end of AFDC. In her last chapter, apparently convinced that we will not restore support for low-income mothers to care for their children rather than work for pay, Reese calls for a New Deal for Working Families, which includes the kinds of material and time supports for workers’ family lives that have withstood incursions in European welfare states. The century of politics Reese has so articulately and readably traced makes her envisioned reforms seem remote. But anyone who wants to calculate the prospects of reform or to learn how the U.S. safety net dissolved should read this book.