Going Public: The Role of Labor-Management Relations in Delivering Quality Government Services edited by Jonathan Brock and David B. Lipsky, Champaign, Illinois: IRRA, 2003, 321 pages, ISBN 0-913447-86-2.

This volume, produced as part of the Industrial Relations Research Association Series, contains 11 studies by different authors about labour management cooperation in the public sector. The book begins with an introduction written by the editors (Brock and Lipsky), who do a solid job at tying together the sometimes disparate material which follows. They situate the volume in the context of the dilemma faced by public sector labour-management relations in the US and elsewhere: the demand for increased efficiency and improved quality in the delivery of public services. While some analysts argue for privatization of public services, this volume focuses on labour-management cooperative relationships as a possible solution. Based on the evidence presented in the remaining chapters, they conclude that there are convincing success stories associated with public sector labour management cooperation, but the practice remains fairly rare, because of systemic barriers. Some of these barriers include statutes and some oversight labour boards which do not encourage labour management cooperation as well as the inherent politics of public sector labour relations which create instability. Nonetheless, the authors believe that the demographics of public sector unions (increasingly being “knowledge workers”) plus the continuing threat of privatization will lead the parties to place a higher priority on cooperation in the future. Chapter One, by Lorenzo Bordogna, is the only international study in the volume. He presents a thoughtful overview of the extent of public sector employee relations reform since 1990, aimed at increasing value for money in public service delivery, across eleven industrial democracies. He concludes that the countries fall into three groups. The first group, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, were at the forefront of the “new public management” (NPM) movement, where the government oversaw privatization, introduction of “market-like mechanisms,” decentralization of authority and bargaining, and a weakening of public employees’ special prerogatives. France, Germany, Spain and Japan make up the other extreme, where changes to traditional public employee relations have been limited and incremental in nature. Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Canada fall somewhere in between the two extremes, adopting some NPM techniques. The second chapter, by Terry Thomason and John Burton, looks at the trends in American public sector union density over the last 20 years, but is only tangentially related to labour management cooperation in the sector. This is a thorough empirical examination, tracking union density by level of government, public service industry, occupation, race and gender. The findings indicate a stable overall union density for the public sector (at about 37%), in stark contrast to private sector union density which has fallen from about 17% to 9%. This public sector stability hides two competing forces which have been at work. Public sector unions often have been successful at using political lobbying to increase demand for the public service they provide, which leads to higher employment (and union density), while some employers have successfully transformed public sector union jobs into private sector non-union jobs through privatization (decreasing union density). Stephen Goldsmith presents a fascinating case study of successful labour management cooperation in the city of Indianapolis (Chapter 3). He was directly involved as mayor of the city, having run for election on a pledge to shrink municipal government (the municipal union actively campaigned against him). He explains how his administration engaged the municipal and firefighters’ unions in a process to revitalize the city’s services, without raising taxes, to stem the migration to the suburbs. For municipal services, the union was given the right to bid on any work prior to privatization. The union was given full access to financial and other relevant information (and a city-funded consultant to assist …