From the Two Faces of Unionism to the Facebook Society: Union Voice in a Twenty-First-Century Context

Abstract

Union membership has declined precipitously in the United States over the past forty years. Can anything be done to stem this decline? This paper argues that union voice is an attribute (among many others) of union membership that is experiential in nature and that, unlike the costs of unionization, can be discerned only after joining a union. This makes the act of “selling” unionism to workers (and, to some extent, firms as well) rather difficult. Supportive social trends and social customs are required in order to make union membership’s many hard-to-observe benefits easier to discern. Most membership-based institutions face the same dilemma. However, recent social networking organizations such as Facebook and other online communities have been rather successful in attracting millions of members in a relatively short period of time. The question of whether the union movement can appropriate some of these lessons is discussed with reference to historical and contemporary examples.