The study of trade unions in an age when union density has substantially declined, when entire sectors of the labor market are now non-unionized, and when union prestige is at an all-time low, may seem anachronistic at first glance. Indeed in many parts of the world unions are at the lowest point they have been since the first half of the twentieth century (Checchi and Visser 2005; Martin and Dixon 2010), which gives rise to the possibility that in the more severely affected cases trade unions may soon fade into obscurity.
That said, even in these severe cases, trade unions are presently a reality affecting peopleās lives, and cannot be written off just yet. Unions constitute a reality for those people who are nowadays immediately influenced by union action: as members, as aspiring members, as workers who are non-members, and as employers. Unions also constitute a reality for the greater public, which is sometimes affected by union action and policyāsuch as in the case of halted servicesāand which tends to form attitudes toward the union based on these experiences. Unions further constitute a reality as a political potentiality both for people who see them as āpart of the solutionā and for people who see them as āpart of the problemā. Thus, within social movements, economic enterprises, political movements, and the academia, trade unions represent a potential avenue, either to be sought after or to be dismantled.
It is precisely as a political potentiality that trade unions have long been perceived by some as a possible path for promoting equality and social justice within society. At the forefront of this approach are the social democrats, the most active promoters of this idea, but they are accompanied by various progressive liberals, Marxists, and general leftists. The opposition to these groups comes from both the Left, such as certain orthodox Marxists, but mostly from the Right and Center, such as conservatives and economic liberals. While rightists and centrists usually dispute both economic equality as a goal and unions as a method, leftist opposition only disputes the unionās ability to achieve long-lasting equality. To this day virtually every debate about the trade union phenomenon has implications on the above debate over the political potential of unions, and is thus affected by it. This renders the study of trade union effect a charged issue, since the political implications of how one assesses unions are tacitly ever-present.
Indeed, a lot is at stake here, for theories about social reality often have the tendency to provoke human action. Specifically in recent years theories about the trade unionās positive role in society have directed social activists, professional organizers, politicians, and their electorate to invest energies and hopes in preventing the decline of and in reviving trade unions. They do so based on social theories that have gained popularity over the last few decades, and on some scholastic support. Yet it should be said from the outset that this support leaves much to be desired, since there have not been many attempts to chart all or even most of the ways in which trade unions affect inequality.
Do unions, under good circumstances, promote equality or hinder it? Most scholars of trade unions will agree that studying contemporary unions, in their weakened state , would not constitute the optimal litmus test to examine the unionās potentiality to bring social justice . Fortunately students of unions have more than a century and a half of trade union history spanning the globe at their disposal as a possible tool for assessment. Many scholars will also point out that the unionās best circumstances for promoting equality are when the labor force is ethnically cohesive, such as in the Scandinavian cases. Yet since most contemporary societies are ethnically diverse, this fragmented state is more indicative than a cohesive society of how unions usually interact with inequality.
In trying to answer these questions, I myself chose to investigate trade unions in Palestine under the British Mandate between 1920 and 1948. This case coincides with the high days of industrial unionism and represents a case of a fragmented society, cleavaged according to religion, ethnicity, gender, class, and other criteria. Local trade unions were in the middle of the power struggle between Palestineās different social groups during the entire 28-year period, and are to this day credited with having a significant role in Palestineās economic and demographic transformation . The present book will help clarify what exactly this role was, with regard to Palestineās working-class inequality.
1.1 The Challenges
The Challenge of Studying Trade Unions and Inequality
The seemingly straightforward challenge of understanding the trade unionās effect on social inequality hides behind it a plethora of dilemmas. Neither trade unions nor society are monolithic entities. Trade unions are organizations that operate on several levels, such as the workplace level or the national federation level. They differ among themselves on the type of workers they organize, the collective bargaining tactics they use, how union personnel are appointed, and on many other characteristics. On the other hand they have enough similarities as to warrant being collectively labeled ātrade unionsā by scholars, laymen, and union personnel themselves. What trade unions all have in common is their function as a collective bargaining organization operating on varying levels of the labor market for the purpose of shaping its settings, in order to make them favorable for certain individuals and groups. The three levels of operation usually documented are the combined/centralized level, the sector/profession/region-based level, and the plant/workplace level. Substantial attention will be given to the dynamics of the unionās various levels and the interaction between them.
With regard to society at large, there is an overwhelming consensus within sociology that society is stratified (Savage 2005), that is, that an individualās economic status is not random but rather runs along ascribed and non-ascribed categories. This is important since treating society as a whole usually misses important dynamics. In the case of unions and inequality what may be missed is the possibility that trade unions have a certain effect on one group (e.g. lifting wages) while having a totally different effect on the other (e.g. lowering wages). Treating society as a whole āaveragesā all the different effects of the union on different groups into one figure, and can thus be misleading. Furthermore, we should expect that the effect of unions on inequality will not be constant, and may change depending on the changing circumstances.
Thus the challenge is to track the diverse and contradictory effects unions have on different groups under changing circumstances. For instance, the different effect Mandatory Palestineās unions had on Ashkenazi (European Jew ish) women compared to Yemeni men, or the role unions played in periods of high unemployment compared to full employment . Out of this variety emerge historical patterns, which are indicative of the trade unionās general tendencies to push toward or away from social justice .
The Methodological Challenge
How should a study of the trade unionās effects on inequality be carried out? Trade unions affect society in numerous forms, both directly and indirectly, such that charting them all is rendered close to impossible. Many of these effects have implications on the social distribution of wealth, so that even tracking the unionās effects on inequality alone remains a very difficult taskāespecially because such a task would require quantifying the degree to which each effect contributes to the overall in/equality in a given society.
There are a few quantitative scholars who did attempt to track the unionās diverse economic effects on society (not necessarily on inequality) with some modest success (e.g. Freeman and Medoff 1984). Yet in the process of quantification these scholars tend to lose much of the context of the union phenomenon. Different types of unions are merged into a standardized version, and union strategies are reduced to the end result (Turnbull 2003). Qualitative studies , on their part, have amply shown that union interaction with social groups is contingent upon circumstances and settings, which if taken seriously should discourage us from studying the union phenomenon out of context. However, qualitative studies tend to be case-specific, making it difficult to discern the unionās recurring patterns with regard to effects on society.
In an effort to avoid the pitfalls of both the quantitative and the qualitative traditions, this book does not attempt to exhaust all the forms in which the trade unionās actions affect inequality, but rather to track some of these effects and focus on how trade unions affect labor force inequality in a fragmented society. That is, the focus is on answering the question: under which circumstances do unions promote working-class equality, and under which do they stratify the working class? As to the issue of context, the research presented here is a historical, context-bound investigation, which was carried out on a large scope. That is, by covering the interaction of trade unions in Mandatory Palestine with several ascribed groups, over a period of 28 years (1920ā1948) this investigation spans ample shifts in circumstances, in political settings, in available technologies, and in business cycles, as to present a fair level of generalization.
The Theoretical Challenge
There is currently no ready-made conceptualization of trade union interaction with labor force equality that can be applied to a large subset of global cases. The corporatist approach , which does suggest a way in which unions can contribute to labor force equality, is a framework bound to an elaborate set of circumstances. One such circumstance is that it deals virtually exclusively with cases in which the collective agreement between unions and employers is negotiated on the national level. Thus, it manages to contribute little understanding to those cases where the bulk of negotiations are carried out on lower union levels, as was largely the case in Mandatory Palestine (Sussman 1974, p. 64).
Other union theories are usually applicable to a greater variety of cases but are much less elaborate than corporatism . Most of the texts dealing with trade unions tend to either assu...