Union Agendas and the Disintegration of Job Stability—an Institutional Perspective

Job quality in the US has traditionally been formulated as a synthetic concept where empirical ‘good’ jobs net a whole array of quality dimensions. ‘Good’ jobs, it was assumed, simultaneously provided high wage levels, a high propensity for wage growth, and good job security. The demise of the postwar collective bargaining system and the process of industrial restructuring, with the accompanying decline in manufacturing employment, have created a situation where this view is no longer warranted. Today’s jobs are unlikely to optimise on all dimensions of job quality, and individual employment is likely to be characterised by tradeoffs between different quality dimensions. These tradeoffs are manifested in the institutional structure of empirical labor market in three ways: a) in the public sector, jobs are highly secure but employees have traditionally experienced lower than average wage increases, b) in the strongly unionised manufacturing sector, wage levels tend to be above average but jobs appear to be less secure than elsewhere in the economy, c) in the dynamic tertiary sector, the possibility of wage mobility tends to be substantial while starting-out wages tend to lie below average. This essay argues that contrary to research which has described the efforts of US unions in the past decade as essentially ineffective, unions have met the challenges of disintegrated job quality and contributed to the alleviation of job quality deficits in each of the three sectors outlined above.