In The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do But Join Much Less (Cornell University Press, 2004), Hoover fellow Seymour Martin Lipset and Noah Meltz explore why Americans, who by a clear majority approve of unions, have been joining them in smaller numbers than ever before.
The authors compare the American experience with that of Canada, two outwardly similar countries where attitudes toward and membership in unions have diverged in recent years. Paradoxically, in Canada approval for unions is significantly lower than in the United States, but since the mid-1960s Canadian workers have joined organized labor in higher numbers. Lipset and his coauthors explain that the relative reluctance of employees in the United States to join unions, compared with those in Canada, is rooted less in their attitudes toward unions than in the former country's deep-seated tradition of individualism and laissez-faire economic values.
The Paradox of American Unionism is receiving high praise from some of our most respected social commentators. "This book is destined to be a classic in industrial relations," hails Morley Gunderson of the University of Toronto. Charles F. Doran of Johns Hopkins University adds, "Bold in their hypotheses, prudent in marshalling empirical evidence . . . [the book] contains wonderful analysis."
Seymour Martin Lipset is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and Hazel Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Sociology at George Mason University. The late Noah M. Meltz was principal of Woodsworth College and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions
More Than Canadians Do But Join Much Less
by Seymour Martin Lipset and Noah M. Meltz, with Raphael Gomez and Ivan Katchanovski; Foreword by Thomas A. Kochan
ISBN: 0-8014-4200-1 $32.50 paperback
204 pages July 2004
