Union Revitalisation in Advanced Economies: Assessing the Contribution of Union Organising, Edited by Gregor Gall, London / New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 225 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-20439-3.

Gregor Gall begins this useful contribution to the international union renewal debate with a sobering reality. In spite of the concerted emphasis on “organizing” by a wide swath of unions and federations over the past 20 years, it hasn’t paid off according to the most obvious measure: union density. Despite the shifting of union financial and human resources to organizing, the creation of specialized programs and institutes to train and support organizers, and even, in the US, the emergence of a new rival federation of those unions who have made “organize or die” their mantra, the proportion of unionized workers remains stagnant or has actually continued to fall. In that troubling context, Gall has brought together a host of researchers to explore what difference “organizing” really makes to union revitalization. The volume is comprised of two (primarily) conceptual chapters on the meaning and complexities of the “organizing model” (Martinez Lucio and Stuart; de Turberville), four national-level surveys of organizing strategy in the UK (Nowak), the US (Dixon and Fiorito), Canada (Rose) and New Zealand (May and Goulter), and three chapters of UK-based case studies in aerospace manufacturing, banking and insurance, municipal government and hospitals (Danforth et al.), rail transportation (Darlington), and the British civil service (McCarthy). Despite the UK focus in six of the ten chapters, the book offers insights and methodological approaches that can be usefully applied elsewhere. Making general claims about “union organizing” is a difficult proposition because, as Gall points out, there is no consensus on either its goals or methods; rarely are we evaluating the same set of practices. In this book, as in academic and union circles, “organizing” has at least three main meanings: 1) membership recruitment – undoubtedly the dominant meaning in much union practice; 2) membership mobilization around workplace issues and collective bargaining; and 3) social movement building and mass mobilization based on renewed collective identities, union-community alliances, a reinvigorated commitment to social justice, and an alternative political agenda. Given such diversity, and a lack of consensus over what kind of “organizing” union revitalization requires, Gall’s aim is not to prefer one approach over the other but rather to clarify “the basis for a future research agenda and … the intellectual resources needed … to create … grounded theoretically-informed practice … amongst labour unions themselves” (p. 3). All of the subsequent chapters, however, examine practices based on the first two meanings, leaving the contribution of large-scale and politicized mass mobilization to union revitalization unexplored, even if its desirability is acknowledged. Gall sets out five major arguments for why organizing hasn’t “worked”, some of which are taken up by the volume’s contributors (p. 3-4). First, some argue that the displacement by “organizing” of “traditional” union activity like servicing is a problem, not least because servicing and organizing, whether in theory or in practice, are not mutually exclusive. DeTurberville takes up this issue in a review of his ongoing debate with Carter over whether “the organizing model” exists as a coherent and readily portable strategy against which we can measure union adherence. Second, others accept the basic premise and content of the “organizing model” and the difference it can make, but argue it has been insufficiently supported or adopted as yet. Nowak’s assessment of the TUC’s Organising Academy (p. 146-150), Rose’s discussion of membership certification efforts in Canada (p. 186), and May and Goulter’s exploration of the impact of scale on the New Zealand’s movement capacity to reorganize (p. 192, 200) all emphasize this point. Dixon and Fiorito also emphasize that resources, and not merely the will to organize, are key to union transformation …