Word: freeman
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Their findings fly in the face of most of the current arguments against unions and against the attitudes of industry management. In the course of their research, which took nearly eight years, Freeman and Medoff, both of whom are affiliated with the Cambridge-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), ported over countless government records on industry and personal histories of union members. Finally, they came up with the overwhelming verdict that unions are worth rescuing...
...book stresses what the authors call the "two faces of unionism." While conceding that unions do in fact act like a monopoly in restricting the labor supply. Freeman and Medoff argue that unions are also socially and economically valuable for three reasons. First, because unions give workers a voice and establish grievance procedures, turnover rates in unionized workplaces are far lower than in non-unionized ones. This spares firms the cost of constantly hiring and retraining new workers to replace the disgruntled ones who have left. Therefore, unions are actually productive. In addition, because unions raise wages, management must find...
...what about the infamous corruption traditionally associated with unions? The authors claim that its prevalence is simply exaggerated. "There are more crooked businessmen than union members," says Freeman. Both he and Medoff, who describe themselves "in their 30s," say that the extortionate behavior of unions is isolated and overpublicized, what matters to unions members, they say, is how democratic their local unions is--and this can usually be measured by the amount of turnover among elected officials. "We found that at local unions there was a great amount of democracy. People usually point to the lack of turnover...
With the publication of What Do Unions Do?, Harvard continues its traditional role as a leader in the field of labor economics. According to Freeman and Medoff, the book draws heavily on work previously done by Harvard faculty, in particular The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management by Professors Summer H. Slichter, James J. Healy and E. Robert Livernash, which was published in 1960, and President Bok's and Lamont University Professor John T. Dunlop's 1970 book, Labor and the American Community...
...Freeman and Medoff have done a lot for the way Harvard's labor studies are viewed. Harvard is seen as one of the top, if not the top, places for labor economics in the country," says Linda Bell, a graduate student in economics...