Book Review: Re-Union: How Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States by David Madland

In the United States, we debate how to rebuild our unions, but most of our discussions focus on improving the enterprise-based system that we have had since 1935. We talk about simplifying the National Labor Relations Board union election process, limiting employer opposition to unions during election campaigns, and extending National Labor Relations Act coverage to independent contractors and domestic workers, among others. But broader-based bargaining is seldom discussed. David Madland’s new book Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States fills this void of silence in our public debates. Madland’s book helps the reader understand how myopic our policy discussions regarding labor revitalization have been by addressing how many countries around the world, including most European Union countries, have had some form of “extension” practice, be it via law, policy, or autonomous bargaining, where collective bargaining agreements have been spread to whole sectors. Countries might also have wage boards, many times tripartite, to set minimum wages for workers laboring in more precarious sectors of the economy. In this sense, Re-Union opens up our national conversation to experiences from other countries where policymakers and governments have been more successful than the United States in protecting workers and the middle class. Chapter 3 specifically describes the experiences of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We learn that these countries have embarked on U.S.-style enterprise bargaining schemes with disastrous effects. The United Kingdom and Australia have also experimented at times with broader-based bargaining, yielding better results. The lessons are clear for the United States: we should also experiment with broader-based bargaining. Madland argues that broader-based bargaining can be instituted in the United States through a combination of various policies. Perhaps the most important policy change would include legislative action for the government to extend collectively bargained contracts to specific sectors of the economy. Another policy change would deputize labor unions to provide services that benefit all workers, for example, “workforce training, co-enforcement, and benefits navigation” (p.122). By providing public goods such as those, American unions would mimic aspects of the so-called “Ghent systems” of Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden (p.24). Ghent systems provide robust Book Reviews