Recent Events and Future Unions

Abstract

How can unions increase their appeal to employees in the United States.? Addressing this question requires facing the subsidiary issues of what workers want and what unions can do. We avoid rehashing wellknown arguments on union decline (Fiorito and Maranto 1987) and obstacles to union success (see Fiorito [2007] and Godard [2008] for recent broad overviews). Instead, we focus on organizational and institutional changes that unions can make. We deliberately attempt to “think outside the box” and consider some provocative possibilities.