What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace, edited by Richard B. Freeman, Peter Boxall and Peter Haynes, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007, 244 pp., ISBN 978-0-8014-7281-7.

When this book arrived I eagerly read a few of the key chapters. Many of the contributors are colleagues and friends that I know and respect so I welcomed an opportunity to praise their work. But this book, while reporting useful survey results on workers attitudes and conditions with regard to voice at work, has some serious problems of conception and execution. The inspiration for What Workers Say is the Workers Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS) originally carried out by Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers and reported in What Workers Want (1999, updated in 2006). That survey was remarkable for its finding that nearly all American workers wanted some form of collective representation in the establishment of their conditions of work. Some 32% of nonunion workers wanted a union. Most of the rest wanted “an organization with more limited independence from management.” Only 7% wanted “no organization.” Unfortunately, in my opinion, What Workers Say does not effectively move forward the agenda of revealing the general failure of society to provide working people with collective representation of the sort that they want and to which international human rights standards say they are entitled. Instead, although there is some discussion of (so-called) “nonunion forms of representation,” What Workers Say focuses primarily on traditional union density and the unfulfilled demand for traditional union representation. Alternative voice mechanisms are discussed to an extent but, for the most part, are conceived of as employer-instituted competition for independent unions rather than as alternatives that employees might choose instead of conventional adversarial unionism. There is no clarity of awareness of the important distinction between independent local unionism and employer-dominated employee representation schemes. Into the nonunion conceptual basket goes everything from management briefing schemes to joint consultative committees to whatever the researcher considers to be unconventional worker representation. The contributors to What Workers Say collected similar (but not exactly the same) data from Anglo-American countries other than the United States. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand fresh surveys modeled generally on the Freeman and Rogers study were carried out. In Canada the researchers (Michele Campolieti, Rafael Gomez and Morley Gunderson) mined further the database assembled originally by Noah Meltz and Seymour Martin Lipset and reported in The Paradox of American Unionism (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2004). And for the US, Freeman reprises the WRPS survey and reviews additional relevant surveys that have appeared since the WRPS findings were first published. In an early chapter Freeman, Peter Boxall and Peter Haynes argue that these “Anglo-American” economies are enough alike to constitute a “distinct capitalist model” and present relevant data in support of that claim. With regard to the union situation in the covered countries, David Peetz and Ann Frost summarize the results as follows: “First, union density has declined, but appears to have mostly stabilized. Second, in four of the countries (Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland) union reach [defined by Boxall, et al. as “proportion of respondents who report the presence of a union of some kind at their workplace, and those reporting a union at their workplaces that they can join.”] is considerably higher than the union density figures indicate – which highlights a significant free-rider problem. Third, those who are members of a union overwhelmingly report high levels of satisfaction with their union. Fourth, many nonmembers report their willingness to join a union given the opportunity – importantly, this includes nearly a third of all workers in nonunionized workplaces. Fifth, employees in these six countries report wanting a degree of influence over decision making at work that they do not yet have. …