Nonunion Employee Representation: History, Contemporary Practice, and Policy edited by Bruce E. Kaufman and Daphne Gottlieb Taras, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, 576 pp., ISBN 0-76560494-9.

While good ad hoc employee representation in a workplace can occur independently of any formalized procedure, the health of an employment relationship is usually contingent on the existence of effective channels through which workers and employers can communicate and negotiate. Although the decline of union participation in the North American private sector has led many to perceive a “representation gap” approaching chasmic proportions, a converse trend inside corporate environments promotes alternative forms of employee representation. Such employer-promoted channels of employee voice, and the legislative policies that affect the implementation thereof, are the subjects of Nonunion Employee Representation, a collection of essays by academics and practitioners in both the United States and Canada. Bruce Kaufman and Daphne Taras, authors and co-authors of several chapters in the book, fare better than most as editors of that most awkward of creatures, the conference by-product. Nonunion Employee Representation, published in 2000 (although the conference for which the chapters were initially generated occurred in 1997), remains relevant both for its historical insights and its investigation of themes that remain at the forefront of industrial relations discourse. The book’s 31 chapters are divided into three sections. The first is dedicated to the history of nonunion employee representation (NER) in North America in the early stages of the 20th century. This is followed by a shorter and less inspiring theory section, which includes an economic analysis of employee representation, an organizational behaviour perspective, as well as a lacklustre legal/policy examination of NER. The third and longest section of the book focused on contemporary practice, and provides not only further academic assessments of NER, but colourful contributions from employers, employees, lawyers, union leaders, and civil servants. Kaufman and Taras use the term representation “to mean that employees have the ability and venue to make their collective needs and opinions known to management.” The editors assert that employee representation occurs in two forms, union and nonunion. But two distinct categories they do not easily make; union representation has not infrequently sprung from an ailing industrial committee or company union scheme. Moreover, NER’s very existence in many workplaces seems to be closely linked to the threat of, or competition with, union representation. Indeed, Seymour Lipset and Noah Meltz, in a chapter (10) dedicated to the demographics of NER, find that there is a higher incidence of NER in sectors with high union density. Lipset and Meltz also find a striking similarity in the extent of NER in the U.S. and Canada, despite the dissimilar union densities. From this, they conclude that the divergence of union density in the two countries has more to do with the “supply” of opportunities for workers to join unions than it does with demand for union representation. The link between NER and union representation is also an historical one. Historical contributions in the book, including excellent chapters (4 and 5) on the rise of company unionism in the U.S. and Canada, by Sanford Jacoby and Laurel MacDowell respectively, suggest that modern NER schemes emerged as a response to the labour movement and were largely instituted by employers seeking to create and control outlets for employee voice. Company unions and committee-based systems such as industrial councils were at the heart of efforts to quell employee cries for more autonomous forums. The United States and Canada share a common patron of company unionism. Having already served as Canada’s first deputy minister of labour, when William Lyon Mackenzie King was hired as industrial relations adviser to John D. Rockefeller in 1915, he took on an industrial relations nightmare. Rockefeller bore much public criticism and blame for …