Economic-union Books

This is a great book that covers the economics at an easy level and has lots of good data. Trouble is that it is quite out of date by now since many things have occured since it was published.

This is one of the classic text in the area. It covers most of the main policy areas in a series of chapters written by separate authors. The multi-author thing is a bit disturbing given very different levels. Another drawback is that it contains relatively little economics and not all of that is up-to-date -- most of the book presents policy and institutional details. The latest version is quite up-to-date but nothing on the Constitutional Treaty and little on the 2004 enlargement.

The book cites its best knowledge on the whole functionality of the EU and attempted to simplify the complex political mechanism that afloats in the european realm. My professor did beg to differ and acknowledge the book not as canonical but a considerable piece... Since I'm not a Politics major I must admit this book does document in a simplified form before newbies (like yours truly) falls into the abyss of confusion.

This book was an assigned reading for a class at Oxford. Amazon was the only place in the US I could find it. At any rate, if you are assigned this book, I would recommend other material. Although the book in itself is well written and is very insightful, it is very outdated (hence 'European Community' instead of 'European Union'). This is crtical since so much has changed since this book has been written.

Holland's book is a detailed and rather tedious account of how the European Union put together a united foreign policy. Using South Africa as the main case study. It was written just after South Africa had a historic free election. The first in its history that was open to all races.

A lot of the text is replete with acronyms like COREPER, TEU, EPC, POCO, GATT, ANC, DGIA. Luckily, the author had the forethought of providing a list of abbreviations. But there are many dense passages explaining how various EU bodies and commissions were inter-related, or merged. A lot internal to the EU. Yeah, it was all well meaning, towards the ends of more efficient governing. But surely only a bureaucrat would try to tease out understanding from many chapters.

The more interesting parts of the book concern how the EU tried to support the peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa. Largely quite successful.

Predicting the demise of labor unions, as this volume most assuredly does, has proven injurious to reputations of experts in the past. The editors and contributors to this volume hope to avoid the fate suffered by the economist George Barnett who made such a prediction in 1932, just months before the dramatic resurgence of labor unions. It should be noted that sixteen of the twenty-three contributors to this volume are academicians in the fields of economics and management, who unsurprisingly view labor unions in strictly economic terms.

With considerable overlap, the selections in this book attempt to gain a perspective on the future of private sector unionism by examining the myriad reasons for the drop in private sector union density from 36 percent to 9 percent in the last half century. Among the reasons cited are structural shifts in the economy involving industries, occupations, and worker demographics, the globalization and decentralization of corporations, the substitution effects of human resource management and of legislation that both protects and provides a basic floor for workers, the rise of the social ethos of individualism and consumerism, and a negative public perception of union leaders and the internal workings of unions. That there is a statistical connection between these developments and the slide of labor unions can be little doubted.

However, a main theme that runs through most of the chapters is that employees and employers are subject to and must and do act within a framework of neutral, natural economic forces. Any notion that powerful class dynamics have tilted the playing field on which workers and unions must operate is scarcely acknowledged. There is no recognition of the ability of powerful economic entities, that is, corporations, to exert disproportionate control of the political process from elections to the formulation of workplace legislation or trade policies. The blocking of legislation to greatly increase penalties for managerial discrimination against pro-union workers or permitting the importation of goods from foreign subsidiaries that hardly adhere to minimal international standards for labor or the environment are not examples of an "invisible" hand at work.

The rejection of one author's contention that up to 40 percent of union decline can be explained by managerial opposition, as failing to understand economic necessity, hardly seems compelling in the light of the class dynamics that shape the workplace landscape. In addition, the role of vast multi-media empires to shape public opinion is totally ignored. Unions are invariably cast in an unfavorable light by major media outlets when workplace issues are even considered. Can it be disputed that basic economic understandings of most working people are highly colored by the continual bombardment of the advantages of "free" markets and individual investing in an ever-rising stock market by a business-centered media? Astonishingly enough, one author, in keeping with the theme of the economic free-agency, contends that the new system of "individual [self] representation" is superior to acting in concert with fellow employees. Beyond the fact that "individual representation" is simply incoherent, the author did not find it necessary to admit that this view directly contradicts the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act.

The contention in one essay that the loss of employment in the union sector coupled with gains in the non-union sector largely explains union decline is far too simplistic. Losses in the union sector did not just somehow happen. In fact, the union sector has relentlessly relocated employment to the non-union South and West and globally taking advantage of weak labor laws coupled with little enforcement and of the rhetoric and policies of "free" trade.

Whether one agrees that the various economic phenomena described by the authors "explain" the slide of labor unions, the shrinkage of union density and membership is beyond dispute. Furthermore, it would be difficult to find fault with the view of most of the authors that expects private sector union density to be no more than five to six percent by the 2010's. Do the authors need to be concerned with being placed with George Barnett?

Despite the contention of one author that the 2000's are similar to the 1930's, there is at least one huge difference. In the half-century before the Great Depression, workers continually battled the excesses of capitalism. In the 1930's, workers drew upon the legacy of the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the IWW, the Socialists, and others to gain a foothold within America's corporations. But in the 2000's, in an era of huge economic inequalities, of gratuitous downsizing and re-engineering, and of shipping jobs overseas, among other assaults, workers do not have a similar legacy or a coherent understanding of the forces at work against them. That is seen in the support of political candidates little inclined to counter the forces arrayed against working people. There is little in popular thinking to suggest even the remotest chance of a resurgence in the standing of labor unions.

Gutman's analysis of T/C is marked by the same measure of excellence as T/C itself; Gutman's successful venture into cliometrics is obviously indicative of his prowess and flexibility as a historian. Gutman's greatest success in writing his criticism amounts to this: he beat Fogel and Engerman at their own game by demonstrating the lack of uniformity and impotence of the statistics used by the authors, as well as exposing many tenuous claims Fogel and Engerman drew from their data. His criticism, although at times annoyingly tenacious in its attempt to prove the cliometricians wrong, is thorough and a solid piece of scholarship. His persistence, though admirable, is also his biggest folly, for Gutman fails to refute the overarching implications made by T/C, most notably the implication that the antebellum south was capitalist in nature, and was managed by the planter elite, who were, like northern industrialists, driven by economic rationality and the profit motive. This oversight is significant for Genovese, and he quickly addressed the fallicy put forth. He draws directly from Marx (aptly) the distinction between capitalist and pre-capitalist being wholly contingent upon the social (labor) relation between the bourgeois and laboring classes. Because, as Marx deliniates, the social relation in capitalist society is characterized by the presence of wage labor, Genovese rightly rejects the classification of the southern economy as capitalist. Explaining why the Marxist interpretation is more fitting would require a lengthy and tedious review of the first volume of Capital, but if the reader is familiar with Marx, he can appriciate that the advantage the Marxist model offers over the Capitalist (chiefly Ricardian) interpretation (the emphasis here being placed upon the existence of labor markets). Furthermore, Genovese's indictment of T/C places a necessary emphasis on the societal aspect of planter society, pointing out its unique, often contradictory place inbetween capitalist and pre-capitalist societies. He characterizes the south as being merchant capitalist, essentially societies that were heavily influenced by profit motive and raw commodity production, yet still retaining a feudalistic flavor in regards to social, and more importantly, labor relations. Fruits of Merchant Capital by Genovese and his wife offers a much more vivid and deep examination of T/C than the overview I've provided, and a more historically pervasive and satisfactory case for rejecting many of T/C's arguments than Gutman's statistical retaliation. I know, my adoration of Genovese is not well hidden, but the assessment of T/C in Fruits is undoubtedly a stronger and more thorough (while remaining less viturperative) socio-economic indictment than is Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game. Read both if you have the time and judge for yourself.

Fascinating to read his account of years of reporting in Russia during the 1930's. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his articles supporting Stalin's disinformation campaign concerning the terrible famine in the Ukraine and other southern parts. He heard of "rumors of famine to the south" but did not bother to find our the facts because he might be kicked out of the country. Some brave reporting there! There was an attempt by the Ukrainians recently to have the Prize revoked even though Durranty is long since dead- that failed.

Under what is perhaps the most misleading cover I have ever seen is a study of late tsarist Russia's attitudes toward the peasant commune, and an analysis of the western economic influences on Russia prior to 1905. Kingston-Mann traces the western examples of England, France, Denmark, and Germany in their agricultural modernization and attitudes toward the peasantry, and shows how Russia's economists borrowed from these. Common to the western-oriented economists she looks at is an anti-commune attitude, viewing the basic peasant institution as backward, "asiatic," and an opponent to modernization. She also gives examples of thinkers and schools of though, from the Slavophiles to the later writings of Marx, that had a more positive view of the commune, but were largely suppressed or decried as romantic and reactionary by the anti-peasant "westernizers." Ending with modern parallels in contemporary Russia, Kingston-Mann pleads that contemporary advocates of Russian economic reform consider the effects of their ideas on the populace, and resist the drive to "over-westernize."

While her scholarship is very thorough, Kingston-Mann is too concerned with the attitudes and representation of the peasantry to consider their actualities, and the book suffers somewhat for this. There is little consideration of the entrepreneurialism and role of the serf and post-emancipation peasant. She also disregards the pro-commune attitude of the Tsarist government post-emancipation, and has little to say about the peasant oriented Socialist Revolutionary party. But aside from these objections, this book is a strong example of economic and intellectual history in late tsarist Russia.

This detailed study looks at the British press's portrayal of the EU in the year before the 1997 General Election and during the British EU presidency of 1998. From the start, the authors admit to what they call an `overt as well as ideological pro-European underpinning'. (This incidentally reveals that they make the familiar EU supporters' confusion between Europe and the European Union.)

Their description of the articles that they analyse is often highly tendentious. They construe praise for any European country's achievements as `pro-Europe', again meaning pro-EU. They describe as `vague yet highly emotional' and `Europhobic' the legally correct statement that "No government has the right to give away sovereignty. Our sovereignty does not belong to politicians. It belongs to the people." They write that calling Greece poverty-stricken is `inadmissibly xenophobic'. So we can easily see how they are able to dismiss all the coverage of the EU by the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Express and the Sun as xenophobic.

They also accuse these papers of `Germanophobia'. Their evidence for this? That these papers dare to assert that Germany retains its historic ambitions to expand. The authors have apparently discovered a novelty: a capitalist class that has no desire to expand.

So this book shows how empty EU supporters' accusations of xenophobia are. We should not accept our enemy's definitions. Opposition to the EU is extremely widespread - we have to work with all those who oppose it. In the Second World War, the Soviet Union did not hold Churchill's past against him. Similarly, we must welcome patriotic allies in our fight for national independence, and we should concentrate our fire on those who back the EU against our nation. The struggle to retain our sovereignty is a national one.