The Market for Union Services: Reframing the Debate

What is union representation? Is it a banding together of employees for mutual aid and protection? Or is it the decision by a group of employees to contract with a provider of negotiation services? And what, then, is the union representation election? A laboratory experiment, a rough-and-tumble election, or something else entirely?

At the center of my article, Information and the Market for Union Representation, is a new conception of the union representation election. My many thanks to Catherine Fisk, Harry Hutchison, and Jeff Hirsch for their thoughtful and thought-provoking essays in response to the article. This Essay is a brief reply to their efforts, in hopes that it is just the beginning of a much more extended conversation about the way we conceive of and regulate union representation.

Traditionally, labor law has characterized the election as a laboratory in which the “uninhibited desires” of employees can be distilled or as a political campaign in which two sides vie for victory. These metaphors, however, are more misleading than instructive. Instead of the enforced sterility of the laboratory or the competitive hurly-burly of an election, a better approach is to see the election as a decision whether or not to purchase union representation services. Because the union is selling a collective good, an election provides a means for determining the wishes of the majority. But framing the decision as an election does not change the underlying dynamic—namely, employees are deciding whether or not to pay a particular union to represent them in collective bargaining.

Although the commentators all have different responses to this “purchase-of-services” paradigm, none of them argue that the laboratory conditions model or the political campaign model should remain ensconced as the appropriate framework. Moreover, all three seem to agree on the importance of the information to the representation election process. However, they diverge in their concerns about the policy implication of this new approach. Because the article focused on establishing both the new approach and the information deficiencies that the new approach illuminates, I did not spend much time on the policy implications. But since the commentators have brought up a number of fascinating possibilities, I would like to devote the substance of this brief Essay to the policy implications they raise.