The background to the research reported here is located in two General Elections in Britain, 1964 and 1979. In the 1964 election, housing assumed a central political role, which indirectly can be traced to the activities of one west London private landlord named Rachman. Interest in Rachman was the by-product of the Profumo Affair, a ministerial sex scandal, which rocked the Conservative Government and led to its downfall in 1964 (see Green, 1979). Rachman and his rent collectors provided the key issue over which the 1964 election was fought: the poor physical condition of the housing stock, the absolute need for housing and the necessity for the state to intervene in housing to remove the worst excesses of the private provision of housing. In the early 1960s, private rented housing comprised approximately one-third of the housing stock in England and Wales, and in urban areas such as Greater London the majority of households were private tenants. At that time, private rented housing provision was a significant political issue.

It was not until 1979 that housing reappeared as a crucial election issue, but in the context of a radically new debate and a new set of policy issues. The focus of the debate over housing was no longer the problem of supply, the condition of the housing stock, but rather one of demand, the problem of tenure.

The previous chapter traced the structured but uneven decline of the private rented housing sector and argued that three processes, disinvestment, investment and informalisation, were significant in accounting for the changing pattern of private renting. In this chapter we turn our attention from the processes themselves to the agents who are involved in these processes. It is clear that private landlords are a diverse and heterogeneous social group and much of the literature on landlords and the rented housing market has attempted to reveal the diversity of their actions in the market place: the extent to which tenancies have been converted from unfurnished to furnished, the lack of amenities in rented housing, the number of improved properties, the extent of sales to owner-occupation, and so forth. Such studies, as noted in the previous chapter, have indeed contributed to our understanding of the changes that have occurred in the rented housing market, but they have often left us with little detailed knowledge of who is actually carrying out these actions or why they were undertaken. There is a methodological gap between the exhaustive detail with which landlords' activities are plotted and the analytical skills used to classify the nature and characteristics of different types of landlords.

We selected our sample for the intensive and extensive surveys from the records of households who had recently been rehoused by their local authority from the private rented sector into council accommodation. This gave us a sample of lettings in which a complete or partial vacancy had been created as, at each address we selected, at least one household space had been vacated in the recent past.

When an individual or household applies for rehousing by a local authority, details of that household's personal and housing circumstances are recorded. These include information about family structure, the applicant's employment circumstances and housing conditions. For those applicants living in the private rented sector the landlord's name and address, if known, is recorded, as well as the name of the agent or other person to whom rent is paid. Thus these records provide a list, albeit partial and incomplete, of a proportion of the landlords who own property in these boroughs.

The sample was chosen from a list of those households who had been registered on the housing waiting list for varying lengths of time, and had been rehoused by Hackney and Islington over a two year period, ending in May 1980 in Hackney and September 1979 in Islington.

There is a certain irony in the decline of organized labor and the problematic status of federal labor policy. Although union contracts protect fewer workers from employers' arbitrary decisions, and the National Labor Relations Board appears less reliable in protecting workers' rights as defined by collective bargaining agreements, employers' discretion regarding the treatment of their employees actually seems to have narrowed over the past decade. At the local level, experiments with new forms of labor–management collaboration in nonunion settings have sometimes involved considerable commitment of employers to the welfare of their workers; quasi-union conditions are typical in these settings. In union situations, there have been attempts to broaden workers' discretion in the production process in the hope of increasing labor productivity (witness the partnerships between the United Auto Workers Union and General Motors Corporation in the Saturn Project and the NUMMI plant).

At a broader level, there have been important state-level public policy innovations in nonunion labor–management relations, especially involving limits upon employers' rights of dismissal. Many states have modified the applicability of employment-at-will, the common law doctrine controlling employment relations in nonunion, noncollective bargaining situations. As proscribed in the leading case Payne v. The Western & Atlantic Railroad (1884), employment-at-will provides employers with the right to hire and fire for any reason or no reason, at whatever time they desire. Originally, employment-at-will was simply a practice, legitimated by case law as opposed to statute.

We have come a long way in this book. It began with a brief statement on the importance of a community-oriented perspective for understanding the current crisis of organized labor, and moved quickly to two case studies which sketched some of the basic issues. This relatively simple presentation of the book's underlying thesis was replaced chapter by chapter with more complex interpretations of the intersection between unions and communities. In this way, other ingredients were added to my thesis and were evaluated in terms of their significance. Included were analyses of the impacts of geographical and economic restructuring and the tensions involved in orchestrating international union solidarity. From empirical models of unions' performance in representation elections through to detailed case studies of institutions and the status of labor law, my goal was to illustrate the many different ways of understanding the union–community connection.

At the outset I noted that no one test of the union–community connection would be introduced to demonstrate its utility for understanding the current crisis of organized labor. In this sense, I do not claim to have proved my case, as a simple-minded empiricist might want me to proclaim. Indeed, the various ways shown of conceptualizing the union–community connection should be reason enough to suppose that any one test would be inadequate. Nevertheless, by itself each way of illustrating the union–community connection provides an empirical perspective on the problems facing the American labor movement.

On 19 June 1935, the Committee on Rules debated House Resolution 263 – a resolution to report the Wagner Act to the floor of Congress for final approval. In that debate House members sought to clarify and defend provisions of the Act. While doing so Representative Mead (D – New York) said, in part, that the Act “creates a democracy within industry which gives our industrial workers the same general idea of freedom which the founding fathers conferred upon citizens of the United States. It prohibits force and intimidation and leaves men to organize or remain unorganized as they shall desire.” At the time, Representative Mead's interpretation of the Act, electoral democracy for industry, was one amongst a number of competing and complementary interpretations. Since passage of the Taft–Hartley amendments in 1947 it is now assumed that this interpretation was central to the Act. Indeed, Stone (1981) suggested that as representation elections mimic partisan political elections, the Act embodies a fundamental ideal of American liberalism: local electoral choice.

President Roosevelt noted in signing the Wagner Act into law that it “[establishes] the right of self-organization of employees in industry for the purpose of collective bargaining, and provides methods by which the government can safeguard that legal right.” The National Labor Relations Board was the federal agency charged with the responsibility of holding representation elections and adjudicating appeals over conduct of the electoral process. These elections are the life-blood of any union.

The 1980s brought considerable hardship to many people and their communities. Podgursky's (1987) study of post-1980 worker displacement for the National Academy of Sciences' panel on technology and employment (see Cyert and Mowery 1987) indicated that of the many millions of industrial workers who lost jobs in recent years few were lucky enough to find similar jobs. Displaced workers have suffered under-employment and unemployment with incomes (wages and benefits) much below previous levels. Employment in other expanding sectors (predominately service sectors), relocation, and higher levels of household labor market participation (typical blue-collar adjustment strategies) have rarely made up the difference. Indeed, some commentators argue that economic restructuring has substantially reduced the number of well-paid manual jobs and has further polarized the distribution of wages and salaries (Bluestone and Harrison 1987; Harrison and Bluestone 1987).

If economic restructuring were randomly distributed across the United States, it is doubtful its effects would have much political significance. However, economic restructuring is inherently geographically differentiated, most recently concentrated in American factory towns and cities whose histories are intimately linked to the evolution of whole industries, firms, and plants. In these communities, plant closings and worker displacement are economic and political disasters. Plant closings often mean economic desolation, massive unemployment, and the collapse of other related businesses.

Economic restructuring can also be an intense political drama, involving state and local governments, community organizations, corporations, and unions.

How might patterns noted in the previous chapter be explained? What theoretical perspectives are available for interpreting the decline of American unions? There is a massive literature on American unions, and the unionization process. The focus of this chapter is reserved for economic-oriented and geographical models of American unions. Two related issues are addressed: one concerns how we ought to understand the growth and decline of unions over time and place. The other concerns how we ought to conceptualize unions as organizations. In conclusion, comments are made about the methodological bases of analyses presented in subsequent parts of the book.

The literature on unions extends over a long period of time and has seen many different frameworks come and go. Not surprisingly, there have been numerous attempts to review and systematize this literature, providing a steady stream of innovative modes of understanding the unionization process. Yet, for all this research, there is a great deal of pessimism about the utility of recent research. Fiorito and Greer (1982:19) observed that “[a]t present, there is no satisfactory model of union growth [or decline].” This sentiment is echoed by Hirsch and Addison (1986:72), who commented about a popular technique of analysis that “time series studies available to date tell us very little [about the current crisis of American unions].”

It appears that many researchers are uncomfortable with the hetero-geneity of union experience, and would prefer an integrative framework which would eschew diversity for a standard model applicable to an average situation.

The essential argument of this book is that the current crisis of organized labor ought to be considered in terms of the local context of labor-management relations; that is, the communities in which men and women live and work. This argument, and the overall logic of the book, are premised upon two suppositions. First, whether by design or necessity, the structure of New Deal national labor legislation has sustained and maintained distinctive local labor-management practices. Second, as the economies of American communities (and the world) have become highly interdependent, reflecting the evolution of corporate structure and trade between economies, unions have found it difficult achieving a similar scale of integration. Indeed, the crisis of the union movement can be traced, in part, to unions' dependence upon inter-community solidarity, a fragile democratic ideal which is often overwhelmed by economic imperatives operating at higher scales in other places.

In evaluating others' analytical frameworks which have been used to study the recent performance of American labor unions, I have been surprised at the neglect or disinterest shown by scholars of the intersection between unions and communities. Too often, the diversity of local experience is rationalized in terms of a supposedly all-embracing national labor-management relations system, despite bitter disputes between labor and management which seem to have the community as an essential ingredient. And, too often, it is imagined that unions are just like corporations; national and international institutions, structured as hierarchical top-down command organizations reflecting the imperatives of the market.

In a recent decision, a panel of the National Labor Relations Board set aside a narrow union victory in a representation election involving the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union Local 1034 and the Bristol Textile Company. During an acrimonious election campaign two employees were overheard saying that they would slash the tires of employees who opposed the union. The union won the election by a 15–12 vote, with two ballots challenged. The company filed an objection with the NLRB claiming that the threat to slash tires so affected the atmosphere of the election that a second election was warranted. On appeal, the NLRB panel held that the threat was “plainly coercive.” Because of the closeness of the margin of victory, and the fact that at least seven voters were aware of the threat before the election, the panel ordered a new election.

In another case, this time involving the United Food and Commercial Workers and a supermarket chain, the Board ordered a new election because a management consultant “unlawfully interrogated” employees about their prior union experience just before the election. In this instance, the union lost by a vote of 27–51 and appealed to the Board claiming (in part) that the management consultant's questions had a coercive affect on employees. Chairman Dotson dissented from the majority opinion, arguing that the interrogation was an isolated event, which would have had no effect on the outcome of the election.