Economic-union Books

Collaboratively compiled and edited by expert and educated economists Jeroen J.M. Kremers, Dirk Schoenmaker, and Peter J. Wierts, Financial Supervision In Europe is a college level debate and discussion of the repercussions of financial market integration and the structure of financial supervision in the Eurpoean Union. Questioning whether a European system of supervisors might have deleterious long-term effects upon international financial markets, and postulating that, as integration continues, a reform of the organizational structure of the supervision in Europe may become needed, Financial Supervision In Europe backs its arguments with a wealth of data, proposals to facilitate better models, examination of the incentives for national supervisory authorities to monitor cross-border matters, and much more. Highly recommended for advanced economics students, lecturers, researchers, and professionals in the world of banking and finance seeking to broaden their understanding and perceptions.

This is a not only useful book for students of European politics and law. It outlines possible lines of divergence in European integration that could benefit consultants and strategists looking for new opportunitites. Junge was awared the Europa prize for the framework developed in the book.

For years I've looked for a truly excellent, comprehensive history of the USSR's early formative years. There are a few, but this is the best I've found for a serious student. This work by Carr & Davies is focused on the economic development, the struggles over priorities and strategies, and the reasons why the USSR took the path it did.

The most obvious feature of this work is that it is LONG. Two large volumes devoted to three years in the life of a country--and devoted explicitly to the economic modalities of that country (Carr also has written copiously on the early USSR's other issues, such as foreign policy and political turmoil) suggest that Carr sought to furnish the definitive account.

The book employs a semi-encyclopedic organization: "Part One: the Economic Order" addresses the collectivization of agriculture as a complex process, molded by Russia's distinctive customs and class structure; the development of industry; Leninist mobilization of labor; trade and distribution in a Leninist economy; finance; and planning.

These works are largely free of ideological polemics; for the most part, decisions and actions are treated as responding to known pressures and dilemmas. Yet the style of exposition is lively and candid, so that it is a pleasure to read: fortunate, considering each volume is a thousand pages.

CAVEAT: Readers will surely understand, of course, that Carr & Davies completed this in 1970. Since then, with the collapse of the USSR, an abundance of archived material has become available. However, I doubt anyone who had read neither this work nor any of its breadth would be able to grasp the significance of post-92 revelations.

In all his many decades of contributions to economics and social science, Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek never wrote truer words than these: "It cannot be stressed enough that the coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise contrary to all principles of freedom under the law is primarily the coercion of fellow workers." The story of how that coercion was imposed on American workers -- and how workers have tried to recapture and restore those rights -- is the focus of this excellent and much-needed book by George Leef.

Right to Work occupies an anomalous position in American life. On the one hand, Americans overwhelmingly endorse the idea that no one should be compelled to join or support a labor union in order to get or keep a job. On the other, the fight to advance that principle tends to take place in relative obscurity. That makes the National Right to Work Committee, the focus of Leef's book, both one of America's most important political organizations, and one of its least well known.

To the extent it is well-known, the National Right to Work Committee is often thought of as part of the American conservative movement. But as Leef makes clear, this is more an effect than a cause. Linda Chavez demonstrated in her 2004 book "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics" how the American Left is bought and paid for by Big Labor. From the standpoint of practical politics, therefore, opposing union-boss coercion often becomes a "conservative" position. Despite Big Labor propaganda, Right to Work is neither a corporate front nor an anti-worker position. In recounting the history of the Committee and the fight against forced unionism, Leef shows that Big Business has been, at best, AWOL. More often, it has sided with the union bosses' strong-arm tactics in pursuit of the shameful lie of "industrial peace." In fact, the fight has been led by heroic union members, small employers, and other principled individuals. The price some of them have had to pay for their principles -- up to and including death at the hands of union thugs -- is a sobering fact that many Americans may, yet again, not be aware of.

"Free Choice for Workers" is a fascinating look at American labor history. But it's also a revealing peek inside a most effective political organization. Some of the political pelts hanging on the Right to Work trophy wall include not only the defeat of common-situs picketing in the 1970s and the Pushbutton Strike Bill in the 1990s, but also the electoral defeat of Big Labor puppets like former U.S. senators Gail McGee and Al Gore, Sr. Additionally, as Leef explains, the National Right to Work Committee pioneered the use of direct mail (the cornerstone of the modern conservative movement) for mobilization and fundraising. Similarly, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation was "the first conservative nonprofit legal aid organization and it blazed the trail for the entire conservative litigation movement" (p. 149). I'd bet few "movement conservatives" realize quite how much they owe to Right to Work heroes like Reed Larson.

Finally, "Free Choice for Workers" is a disturbing study of how the Left works year after year, decade after decade, to restrict the rights of employers, property owners, and working men and women. Their language of "solidarity" and "collective security" comes straight out of the socialist hymnal. But their true objective is expanding their own empire of wealth and power. George Leef has given us yet more proof of just how far down Hayek's road to serfdom America has already traveled.

If turning the country around can be achieved through political action (a debateable question, though outside the scope of this book), success or failure will have a lot to do with the success or failure of the Right to Work movement. And that makes this book a very important one indeed.

I worked first-hand with reformers marketing civil society and democratic participation in the run-up to Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and so I was drawn to this new book about the future of the Former Soviet Union after a review of it in The Economist (2/2/06) piqued my interest. (Full disclosure: I also know the author.) As the review notes, communism "once divided the world into two camps, with a grey zone in between. Now capitalism has similarly divided the former captive nations." So what are today's dividing lines, as so articulately and convincingly described in this book? The newest members of the EU, who increasingly participate in the world economy vs. the more insular nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), who are being drawn into a new, isolated Russian Empire. (The war-torn Ballkan states represent the grey area in between.) Wow! I had no idea that World Bank economists actually could write interesting--and relevant--stuff, especially uncovering trends that will surely affect the world economy's future, if not our national security and those of future generations. The principal author of this book, Harry Broadman, is obviously an exception. Read the book to uncover the reasons behind this rapidly emerging state of affairs -- which evokes a certain sense of historical deja vu -- and to find out what can be done about it. The key lies in the fact that contrary to what might be conventionally thought, it is the lack of domestic--or what the book calls "behind-the-border"--reforms, rather than international factors, that account for the current gap between these camps and their relative success in integrating internationally. Put another way, what goes on behind the "curtain" is once again posing a threat to us; but, regrettably, most of us don't see it. I admit that books about economic affairs may not strike many as sexy--especially if they come out of the Bank--but this one is.

Raw Deal

Once in a while you read a book chock full of information you didn't know that you didn't know, or more importantly that you didn't know you needed to know. "The Fruits of Their Labor," by Cindy Hahamovitch, is such a book. The subtitle - Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 - only hints at the breadth of the subject matter, which stretches to include an economic and social history of agriculture in states from Maine to Florida and the Deep South. Though the author traces the changes in farming and truck-gardening that resulted from the partial mechanization of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the focus of the book is on the conversion of traditional year-round farm-hands into seasonal laborers, and thus to the lowest-on-the-totem-pole migrants whose welfare was of minimal interest to ever-larger farm businessmen. More than half of the book deals with the twelve years of the New Deal and the Second World War, revealing how ineffective the "reformers" were in the face of opposition from racists and conservatives of both parties. It's no surprise to learn that FDR threw farm labor to the wolves, excluding it from the benefits of collective bargaining. Likewise, it's hardly shocking to realize how little understanding of rural realities the urban reformers of the era were, in their hopes that paternalism and a little health education would restore the agrarian paradise envisioned by Tom Jefferson. The value of this book comes from observing the mechanisms of interest groups - owners, to be blunt - in turning the efforts of government at all levels to the service of their selfish interests. It's also quite astonishing to observe how capitalistic farm-owners and government at all levels colluded, first in the callous exploitation of recent immigrants from Italy and then in the cultivation of the harvest of easily manipulated "undocumented" workers from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia, which the same people are still hypocritically ranting against. And finally, at the broadest level, this text is a study of the malfunctional interaction of federal and state governments at cross purposes, with the worst outcomes invariably befalling the humblest citizens.

I know something about the history of agriculture in the Far West, from the days of the Southern Pacific "Octopus" to the heroic struggles of Cesar Chavez and the UFW. I know it academically, but also personally. During my high school summers in California in the late 1950s, I was a "fruit picker" - trailer court white trash - with most of my earnings going to feed my family while my father blew his paychecks on another recent-model car. I picked string beans, hops, tomatoes, and prunes. It was filthy, fatiguing, and unhealthy work, and a source of shame when my classmates heard of it. The idea that bringing in the harvest is healthful and noble was and is cow flop; breathing dust and pesticides in the hot sun for ten or twelve hours a day is not a pleasant interlude. I finally looked old enough to get a job picking apples from a ladder, the cleanest and most profitable sort of field work, if not the safest. At age eighteen, I was legally old enough to work in the cannery. It was still back-breaking; as the freshest face, my task was to lift boxes of apple sauce from a conveyor belt to a palette, and I estimate that I handled as much as thirty thousand pounds of apple sauce a night. But it was a union cannery! For work that was if anything less skilled than picking, I got paid an hourly wage that was eight times higher than I ever earned on the ladder. It was the Teamsters' Union, by the way. I kept my membership all through my four years at Harvard College, where two of my classmates were Richard Darman, Bush I's budget director, and Boyden Gray, the Bush Family legal counsel.

The history of farm labor and thwarted unionization east of the Mississippi is, if anything, even more dastardly than that of the West Coast. It's not a story that makes for pleasant reading, though Ms. Hahamovitch writes clearly and unpretentiously. Perhaps the best way to capture your interest will be to offer a few snippets.

Page 165 - Discussing the market-place economics of farmer labor, she writes: If labor prices are taken as a measure of farm labor supply , then it is difficult to explain why truck farmers complained of labor shortages when they were apparently well supplied with labor. [This was in the years just before WW2.] However, the notion of a "labor market" that operates according to rules of supply and demand ignores the impact of custom and culture, of deeply held assumptions about what labor is "worth." [The assumptions she refers to are the racial and class prejudices which have shadowed every aspect of labor history in the Land of Equality.]
Page 178 - Discussing the WW2 importation of workers from the Caribbean and Mexico, managed by the federal government, she writes: The WFA was reluctant to include Puerto Ricans in the program because, as U.S, citizens, they could not be "repatriated" at the end of a contracted period. The solution...was to withhold a portion of each worker's pay and deposit in a Puerto Rican bank. The workers.... could not withdraw these funds until they returned home....
On the next page, she describes the use of POWs to oversupply the labor pool in order to keep workers from successfully demanding higher piece rates: POWs represented a particular challenge to federal authorities, because although enlisted men could be forced to work...they could hardly be fired or deported. They were in some ways in a position analogous to that of slaves, but unlike slaves they could neither be whipped nor sold.

Pow! Did you know that the USA used forced labor during WW2? Actually, that's not nearly as shocking as the laws passed in several Southern states that required men to work in the fields or be immediately drafted, and women to work in agriculture or be jailed. Black men and women, of course. There were also laws during both World Wars that required agricultural workers to remain in specific counties, and those laws were enforced by local authorities even when various federal agencies tried to recruit workers to save crops in truly labor-short areas.

To recount all of Ms. Hahamovitch's amazing revelations, I'd need to quote the whole book. One further thought: States' Rights was born as a tactic to defend slavery, and States' Rights has remained inextricable from racism ever since. If that thesis seems unpalatable to you, then you are one of those who don't yet know what you don't know, and you'd better start informing yourself by reading "The Fruits of Their Labor" before you denounce me as a spawn of liberalism.

A feminists perspective on womens fight for equality in Mexico. A great book, a little wordy but jam packed with salient info.

I had great success using the galleys of Global Antitrust Law & Economics to teach Comparative Antitrust Law at the University of Haifa Law School during the summer of 2006, to both American and Israeli law students.

This textbook is the first and only one on the market that is extremely well suited for use in a comparative antitrust law class. When I taught comparative antitrust in Scotland a few years ago I had to put my own material together because there was no comparative textbook on the market suitable for classroom use. It is simply astonishing that, even though knowledge of European competition law has been important for a United States antitrust lawyer for more than a decade, until now there was no single volume that bridged these fields comprehensively. But at long last the market has filled this considerable gap - by producing Global Antitrust Law & Economics.

This is an extraordinarily teachable book that contains everything you might want to present in a comparative antitrust or comparative competition law class. It always contained exactly what I was looking for - the relevant background, and both the similarities and the areas of greatest contrasts between the United States and the European systems. Moreover, it contains so much of each type of material that the instructor gets the pleasure of picking and choosing which of their favorite topics to cover.

Both the law and the economics are extremely clearly and interestingly presented. I used it to teach a class of students who has never before taken a class in antitrust or competition law. We had to omit much of the book's more sophticated material. However, I have no doubt that anyone teaching an upper level class for students who already have taken a basic class in United States antitrust law or EU competition law would find this more advanced material extremely useful. Its mix of background material and state-of-the art material should make it similarly valuable for antitrust lawyers who have an international practice.

I believe I speak for comparative antitrust teachers everywhere when I say "thank you". Finally, the comparative antitrust law book we have been waiting for has arrived. Finally, the comparative antitrust field has a standard textbook to use. And what a wonderful standard it is.

Robert H. Lande
Venable Professor of Law
University of Baltimore School of Law

This is the only comprehensive analysis of Gorbachev's reform policies. The approach is historical. There is no faddish jargon. The writing is clear and elegant. The author explains very convincingly how Gorbachev struggled with elements of the Communist Party apparatus to institute his reforms. Highly recommended for courses in contemporary Russian history and on the Cold War era.

Great book. Lots of information on the labor struggle in S. Colorado. Especially Trinidad and Ludlow