The Contradictions of Business Unionism and the Decline of Organized Labour

This paper deals with some of the problems associated with institutionalized collective bargaining in the US. During the twentieth century this has invariably taken shape around contests over wages or distributive issues. This paper argues that such a preoccupation is largely the result of organizational and institutional imperatives that have impelled unions and management to deal with tangible, incremental issues that are not threatening the conventional assumptions about the capitalist work process. After identifying the saliency of contractual formalism in collective bargaining, the author shows how unions as organizational entities more often than not have impeded rank-and-file input into centralized policy-making and ignored worker concerns over non-economic issues. Consequently, labour-capital conflicts have often occurred outside of the established parameters over issues such as work rules and on-the-job decision-making.