Labor and Inequality: American Society After the Decline of Unions JAMIE K. MCCALLUM Middlebury College mccallum@middlebury.edu Sociologists of labor are fond of extolling the pros and cons of what trade unions do or have done in the past. But the consequences of labor’s near-disappearance are rarely mentioned. This is the main question in Jake Rosenfeld’s eye-opening book, What Unions No Longer Do. Rosenfeld assesses the outcomes of an American society in which its workers no longer benefit from high levels of union membership. In so doing, he has told a new story about a central feature of contemporary American life— inequality—and has tied it to what is typical- ly regarded as nothing more than a footnote of U.S. history—the decline of the labor movement. In the United States, union mem- bership declined at the same time that eco- nomic inequality increased. What is the connection? Labor’s Rise and Fall The post-World War II context proved especially fertile for labor organization, and by the mid-1950s, approximately one- third of all non-agricultural workers had a union card in their wallet. During these prosperous—and anomalous—decades after the war, Rosenfeld argues that a ‘‘tripartite arrangement’’ consisting of labor, govern- ment, and business, helped keep wages high. Unions acted as ‘‘pay-setting institu- tions.’’ Moreover, high levels of union mem- bership helped elect political elites who favored, or at least had to deal with, unions and workers, providing the context of broad socio-cultural support for unions. In this context, workers’ institutions were not bit actors, as many historians have argued. Rather, the labor movement grew into ‘‘the core equalizing institution’’ (p. 2) of post- war capitalism, the backbone of a rising mul- tiethnic middle class (emphasis in original). However, union membership declined precipitously throughout the seventies and eighties. By 2009, union membership in the private sector, where it has historically had the largest impact on workers’ livelihoods, clocked in at 7 percent, the same level as dur- ing the first year of the Great Depression. A few explanations for this trend have ris- en to prominence in sociological circles. The globalization of industrial production and the rise of an economy dominated by services and information technology have been seen as a context antithetical to unioni- zation, as well as a prime way that the high union densities within basic industries were either eliminated, shipped overseas, or erased by frightened workers voting out the union and settling for lower wage premi- ums. Rosenfeld deals less with this explana- tion, however, in favor of two others. First, many scholars today see unions them- selves as their own gravediggers because their highly bureaucratized organizations that solidified after World War II were not equip- ped to organize new workers. Second, while Rosenfeld allows that declining approval rates for unions are a reality, he insists they be con- sidered in the context of contemporary poli- tics. In other words, behind both of these trends are political changes that favored the growth of viciously anti-union employers and lawmakers who have played a leading role in labor’s fortunes. In making this claim, he adds a political dimension to the crisis of union decline, a central concern for labor sociologists. Having established a more comprehen- sive understanding of labor’s fate, Rosenfeld turns to his main act: explaining why it mat- ters so much. Through rigorous statistical analysis and a keen eye for history, Rose- nfeld demonstrates that the ramifications of labor’s historic decline are much broader than we previously thought. His work What Unions No Longer Do, by Jake Rosenfeld. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 279 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674725119. Review Essays 167 Contemporary Sociology 44, 2 at ASA - American Sociological Association on June 8, 2016 csx.sagepub.com Downloaded from