A Neglected Corner: Labor Unions and the Pattern of International Trade

It is a striking fact (and, in view of her strong social sympathies, a puzzling one) that during no phase of her long professional career did Joan Robinson seriously interest herself in the economics of labor unions. Thus in The Economics of Imperfect Competition there are chapters on the monopolistic and monopsonistic exploitation of labor but there is almost nothing about the monopolistic exploitation by labor. In her middle years, Keynesian preconceptions prevented her from attaching much significance to the practices of unions; see, for example, her 1945 essay ‘Obstacles to Full Employment’ (Collected Essays, vol. 1, pp.105–14). And in the final capital-theoretic phase of her career she worked almost exclusively with Ricardian models which impose blinkers of another kind.