Unions and Legitimacy by Gary N. Chaison and Barbara J. Bigelow, Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2002, 133 pp., ISBN 0-8014-3512-9.

Drawing from the field of organizational sociology, Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow offer the concept of legitimacy as a tool for both those who research and those who lead unions. As the authors summarize: “Our contribution is the use of the concept of legitimacy as a lens for seeing unions anew. Legitimacy provides a frame of reference for understanding the sources of union strengths and weaknesses. It enables us to understand why some strategies…have been successful while others…have not. And viewing unions in the context of legitimacy lets us see them both as organizations confined to certain avenues of activities by the widely shared expectations and values of constituencies and as organizations capable of managing legitimacy, that is, by changing the way they present themselves to conform to those expectations and values.” Chaison and Bigelow define three types of legitimacy. Pragmatic legitimacy stems from unions serving the direct material self-interest of their constituency. By contrast, unions gain moral legitimacy when they pursue goals of inherent social value—ones that are seen as “the right thing to do.” Finally, with cognitive legitimacy, unions would be seen as an inevitable part of the social fabric in the same way as schools, churches, and hospitals are. Since the authors do not see unions as having cognitive legitimacy, the book focuses on the interplay between the pragmatic and moral dimensions. Chaison and Bigelow offer five case studies. In the first two, the UPS strike and the Harvard Clerical Campaign, unions grew their goals of pragmatic concerns into messages for morale legitimacy. The Teamsters built solid membership support and broad public sympathy by publicizing their pragmatic demands for more full time jobs as a crusade against the involuntary part-time America. Similarly, union organizing among clerical and technical workers at Harvard succeeded only when activists moved beyond simply pitching unionization in terms of bread and butter bargaining gains to a moral effort to improve the quality of education and research by empowering would-be members. The authors contrast these successes with the failure of the AFL-CIO’s Associate Membership program. This effort sought to attract workers to the labour movement by offering a package of group benefits gained through a new category of membership. This narrow pragmatic appeal failed to offer either the bread and butter benefits of a real union or the moral attraction of joining a broader social movement. For Chaison and Bigelow, the contrast between the failures of associate membership and the initial Harvard organizing drives and the success of the Teamsters and the Harvard Unions of Clerical and Technical Workers illustrates the weakness of union reliance solely on pragmatic concerns. The Teamsters and HUCTW did not so much replace pragmatic legitimacy as they placed it in a broader framework that drew on the strength of moral appeal. As a result they increased their ability to deliver on the bread and butter concerns. In the last two cases, unions also maintained their traditional role in protecting the pragmatic concerns of their members while developing campaigns with broad moral appeal. In the battle against the North American Free Trade Agreement, unions succeeded in allying with a wide range of community groups because union leaders linked worker issues with the pragmatic and moral concerns of these other groups. By making the battle against NAFTA a moral crusade, the labour movement gained key allies and notoriety despite ultimately losing the congressional vote. Similarly, the Massachusetts Nurses Association developed the Statewide Campaign for Safe Care to draw community support for their battle against increased mandatory overtime and the increasing substitution of unlicensed personnel for nurses. By defining themselves as defenders …