Lane Kenworthy: Prospects for economic democracy [feedly]

A very provocative post from Lane Kenworthy, an expert economist and commentator on economics and democracy subjects. His observation, backed by new data studies, that institutionalization of union membership WITH unemployment and retraining benefits is s KEY differentiator in maintaining worker influence in democracy.  The implication is suggestive that labor law reform needs to shoot a bit higher than card-check and arbitration to find sustainable footings in the advanced tech economies.

Prospects for economic democracy
https://lanekenworthy.net/2019/09/14/prospects-for-economic-democracy/

The most prominent forms of employee voice are worker participation, labor unions, works councils, board-level employee representation, and worker control. What do we know about them? My take is here.

One bit:

What are the prospects for a revitalization of unions in the United States? When asked, many workers say they would like to have a union or union-like organization represent them. We can point to various aspects of US labor policy that, if changed, seemingly would facilitate an increase in union membership — the 1949 Taft-Hartley Act's permission for states to implement anti-union "right to work" laws, the lack of a Canadian-style card check procedure for forming a union, weak enforcement of labor laws under Republican administrations, and more. And there is no shortage of proposals for how the American labor movement could organize more effectively.

Yet optimism about unions' future in America must reckon with the story told by the chart below. In a handful of countries, procedures established nearly a century ago require that workers be a member of a labor union in order to have access to unemployment insurance, and unionization rates there have remained fairly high. In virtually every other rich democratic nation, despite policies and governments far less hostile to unions than in the US, union membership has fallen just as sharply as it has here.

Unionization 
Share of employees who are union members. 5-country average: Bel, Den, Fin, Nor, Swe. 15-country average: Asl, Aus, Can, Fr, Ger, Ire, It, Ja, Kor, Nth, NZ, Por, Sp, Swi, UK. The thin lines are for individual countries. Data source: Jelle Visser, "ICTWSS: Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention, and Social Pacts," version 6.0, 2019, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies, series ud, ud_s.

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