More Perfect Unions

They would also give workers the scale and security to negotiate with buyers of labor in the marketplace. In the long run, unions might evolve into enormous talent agencies with an economic stake in increasing the wages of members by, for example, taking some small cut of any salary increase and then reinvesting the money into providing workers with the resources to move from sluggish labor markets to booming labor markets.

Whereas traditional unions have an interest in keeping workers in one place, new model unions would encourage them to be footloose, all while maintaining strong ties to their fellow workers. Any proposed labor reform should be guided by a question: Will it facilitate such imaginative futures, or frustrate them? T he smoothest path to reform may be not to update or replace the NLRA but to leave it in place and go around it. A union whose members are satisfied can continue to represent them, and an organizer who believes that an NLRA union would win majority support in a workplace should be free to pursue such a campaign.

But other options should be available, too. Over time, especially if co-ops proved their value, membership in NLRA unions would decline toward zero as capital departed unionized firms, remaining workers voted to change their organizational form, and few new organizing campaigns succeeded. If workers chose to give NLRA unions a fresh look, they could still do that.

This is what real employee choice would look like. Effective reform would have four elements. First, the NLRA must no longer have exclusive jurisdiction over relationships between employers and organizations of workers. The 8 a 2 prohibition on nonunion collaboration between employers and workers must go. None of these changes affects the ability of a union to operate with its current model—to the extent that workers choose it. Co-ops will be held to governance and financial standards appropriate to their potential roles and will be eligible to partner with government in delivering benefits.

They will also have the capacity to earn recognition as the collective representative of employees in a given workplace, but their existence will not depend on such recognition. An employer could support the creation and operation of such a council, but checks must exist on any possible employer domination of its decision making. Applicability of most employment regulation should be negotiable.

Multiemployer bargaining should be banned. Any defined-benefit pensions should be set explicitly outside the protection of federal insurance—if workers want to make such a bet on employer solvency, they should do it on their own initiative. These changes improve the position of the employer by design, with the goal of creating a space for mutually beneficial agreements. Co-ops could take several forms in such a framework. Some might be specific to a company, community, industry, occupation, or combination thereof.

A works council might choose to form a co-op for its own employees and ultimately expand further into the community, or a nonprofit might incubate a number of co-ops within a city. An employer and community college might partner to get a co-op started.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Benefits to scale and expertise-sharing will emerge, but the importance of local relationships and community engagement should place a high premium on local control. Unlike with unions, membership and dues payment would always be voluntary, meaning that the path to success would entail effective provision of services, not an accumulation of political power and victories in contentious workplace votes.

Organizations would have to behave more like employee-owned service providers than the national machines of Big Labor. Social safety-net reforms could allow properly constituted co-ops to receive funding for programs like unemployment insurance, job training, and community college.

A More Perfect Union - Wikipedia

Current proposals like wage insurance and subsidized apprenticeships should consider what role co-ops might play in delivery. Where employers do not provide health insurance, co-ops could serve as an alternative before workers shop for individual plans. Last, co-ops must be kept from redirecting funds toward political advocacy. The restriction on advocacy is consistent with that applied to c 3 organizations including those engaged in public-policy debates , which does not raise First Amendment concerns.

Co-ops will be free to create, and raise funds for, separate political action committees PACs , as many nonprofits do today. But their worker-representation and political functions would remain separate. Workers themselves seem to believe this. So perhaps it is conceivable that policymakers committed to a robust civil society, competitive markets, widely shared prosperity, and a more effective safety net could give organized labor—in a new form, that is—a fresh look.

Send a question or comment using the form below. This message may be routed through support staff. More detailed message would go here to provide context for the user and how to proceed.

• More Perfect Unions — Rebecca L. Davis | Harvard University Press!
• Journal of the History of Sexuality;
• Navigation menu?
• .
• Editorial Reviews.

City Journal is a publication of Manhattan Institute. Experts Hea ther Mac Donald. Topics Hea lth Care. Close Nav Search Close Search search. More Perfect Unions Share. Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The Shape of Work to Come As Davis shows, a movement that set out to repair marriage ended up transforming it. Willimon Christian Century Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Read more Read less. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Will Our Love Last?: A Couple's Road Map. How Love Conquered Marriage.

More Perfect Unions

From Publishers Weekly This fluent study traces Americans' changing attitudes towards marriage throughout the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the period between the initial rise of marriage counseling in the s and the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the s and '70s. Harvard University Press; 1 edition March 31, Language: Be the first to review this item Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Start reading More Perfect Unions on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There's a problem loading this menu right now.

A More Perfect Union

Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. In this well-documented account, Rebecca Davis explains the success of this particular industry. Through it, she spins a national history of relationships. More Perfect Unions offers a focused look at the emergence and practices of marital counseling in the [End Page ] United States, connecting the ways marriages were counseled to be with the ways Americans understood family and socioeconomic stability.

Over an approximately eighty-year arc, Davis observes how various agencies, organizations, and individuals offered shifting notions of sexual normality through their marital therapies. Incredible to contemporary readers are Davis's vivid rambles into particular case files, where one discovers an intimate history of gender inequality in which male infidelity mattered less to right marital relation than a woman's emotional dependency, her housekeeping skills, and her nightly sartorial choices.

At the end of this volume, one wonders if Davis hasn't served as a consultant for the current television series Mad Men ; the Draper marital dysfunction is an embodiment of Davis's historical description.

In some ways, Davis's study implicitly argues that this counseling culture was a backlash against s transgression. Possessing the increasing ability to refigure themselves physically and socially in the public sphere, women in the twenties seemed potentially unbound from family hierarchy. As the companionate marriage became an increasingly viable possibility for relational adulthood, communism became the rallying retrograde accusation against those who proposed affectionate friendship as a premise for marriage.

In the s marriage counseling intervened in this shift, naming marriage as an ideal to be maintained and not as a fluid structure to be occupied creatively.

When social worker Emily Hartshorne Mudd started a Philadelphia marriage counseling clinic in , she became the nation's foremost marriage counseling expert through projections of "marriage counseling as an engine of middle-class respectability" During the Great Depression, then, marriage became "an engine of social stability," diminishing circulating economic upheavals and political confusions with a re-enchanted image of family life