Varieties of Unionism. Strategies for Union Revitalization in a Globalizing Economy, edited by Carola M. Frege and John Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 215 pp., ISBN: 0-19-927014-7.

This book compares union strategies for revitalization at the national, sectoral and local levels in a number of industrialized countries (the USA, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain), with the aim of providing analyses with policy implications for unions. The main strategies identified are organizing, labour-management partnership, political action, reform of union structures, coalition-building and international solidarity. There are ten chapters, each (except for the first, written by Lowell Turner) provided by a pair, or group of three authors, dealing with these strategies in a thematic way across the five countries examined. The book is rounded off by the editors’ conclusion entitled ‘Varieties of unionism’ where the editors engage with the now well-known ‘varieties of capitalism’ idea. Turner’s introduction opens the volume with an up-beat, optimistic and positive tone. Acknowledging the reality of union decline, especially in the USA, he stresses the urgent need for the trend to be reversed and emphasizes the extent and variety of the efforts made by unions in these countries to revitalize themselves. ‘Thus’, he says, in a breathtaking generalization from the five national cases used here that illustrates his approach of making large claims that go beyond his evidence, ‘We find active efforts at labour movement revitalization everywhere in the global North’ (p. 6). In reality, of course, important parts of the ‘global North’ such as the entire Russian-speaking world and Japan, are simply not dealt with. In the chapters that follow, many authors approach their subjects in a more balanced way and make their formulations with more care, even if Turner-like optimism is sometimes (as we show below) in evidence. Chapters two and three are general and focus on ‘Conceptualizing labour union revitalization’ (Martin Behrens, Kerstin Hamann and Richard Hurd), ‘Union strategies in comparative context’ by the editors. Chapter four, ‘Organizing the unorganized’ is by Ed Heery and Lee Adler, while chapter five (Michael Fichter and Ian Greer) deals with what some might call organizing’s antithesis, ‘social partnership’, asking whether it is, in fact, a tool for revitalization. Chapter six (Kerstin Hamann and John Kelly) looks at unions as political actors. Chapters seven and eight discuss internal re-structuring and external coalition-building (‘How does restructuring contribute to union revitalization’ by Martin Behrens, Richard Hurd and Jeremy Waddington and ‘The new solidarity? Trade union coalition-building in five countries’ by Carola Frege, Ed Heery and Lowell Turner). Chapter nine by Nathan Lillie and Miguel Martinez Lucio is entitled ‘International union revitalization: the role of national union approaches’ and is valuable because it achieves a more nuanced (and therefore useful) analysis than some other chapters. Three chapters are now reviewed to show how the book’s themes are handled: union strategies in comparative context by the editors, the chapter on re-structuring, and the conclusions. The first of these identifies six possible strategies and considers two of the overall themes: why do different union movements adopt varying mixes of the book’s five strategies and how can their different degrees of success be explained? Why, for example, is the ‘organizing’ approach more commonly adopted in the ‘Liberal Market Economies’ than in the other countries? The answer lies, the editors suggest, in a combination of structural variables interacting with the ‘historical embeddedness of union movements’ (p. 40). Thus, organizing is likely to feature as a central method of revitalization where bargaining coverage is closely tied to union density. The chapter on the important subject of re-structuring distinguishes between ‘external structure’, i.e. the union movement’s boundaries, and two types of ‘internal structure’: union governance and administration or management and resource allocation. Re-structuring, the authors suggest, may be categorized according to the motivations for …