Justin Fox reviews several of them at Harvard Business Review.
Of the four he briefly synthesizes, I’ll pass on Ariana Huffington’s. She’s got the wit but not the economic credentials. The other three all look interesting. I like his description of Robert Reich’s Aftershock: “the busy person?s guide to inequality economics…is a brisk, intelligent run-through that you can finish in two hours.”
The one I really want to read, though, is Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics. Here’s how he describes it:
the two political scientists start by making the case that economic forces fail to explain why incomes have skyrocketed at the very top of the distribution (the highest 0.1%, and even 0.01%) while going nowhere for the bottom 90%. ?Those at the top are often highly educated, yes,? they write, ?but so, too, are those just below them who have been left increasingly behind.? They contend that government decisions encouraged this income explosion at the top. The crucial turning point, they say, came not in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, but two years before. The business community, reeling after years of labor victories and regulatory encroachments, had begun to organize over the course of the 1970s and focus its energy on politics. The Chamber of Commerce tripled its budget. The Business Roundtable and the American Council for Capital Formation were born. The first two big legislative wins came in 1978, when the Democrat-controlled Congress killed off a proposal to create an office of consumer representation and a union-backed revision of labor laws.
After that there was no turning back: Business groups had figured out how to work the new levers of power in Washington, while the mass-membership organizations that had represented working America?-not just labor unions but also the likes of the American Legion and the Elks?-fell into sharp decline.
I don’t know the lobbying history well enough, but my own observations do tell me that labor union membership in the private sector has fallen off dramatically over the past 30 years. This book looks to be an interesting one.
Yes, labor union membership has fallen off in major sectors. Also, as many workers began to get higher middle incomes, they began to see themselves as middle class and not working class and even if they stayed union members, they didn’t vote that way. They began to see themselves as Republicans. My father was an example of this — the electrical contractor he worked for was unionized around the time I was born. I remember going to Labor Day parades with him and a few rallies (I was at that JFK birthday celebration at the old Madison Square Garden and remember Marilyn Monroe singing — we had union provided tickets up in the rafters, lol). But as I got older, there were fewer union things we attended and he increasingly talked in Republican tones. I remember when there were two garment unions — ILGWU and Amalgamated Clothing Workers — and they were monster power brokers. Now there is only one (UNITE) which merged with the Hotel Workers under the name UNITE Here. The non-profit housing co-operative I live in was sponsored by the NYC local of the International Typographers Union (typesetters), which I believe doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sorry if this comment is long, but it is a subject I know well and feel passionate about.