We examine an important recent organizing success of the US labour movement: the 'Justice for Janitors' campaign in Los Angeles. This campaign has spanned a complete business cycle and shows the union's capacity for growth over time. It illustrates the potential for unions to overcome pro-employer bias of labour laws, as well as their efficacy in appealing to the wider public. It exposes the importance of building coalitions, as well as the value of union analysis of legal, industrial, and political conditions. Our analysis suggests conditions under which unions might survive and thrive in the service sector in the twenty-first century. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2002.

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Sources: Current Wage Developments and author's regression as specified in equation 1. See footnote 4. a. Union wage indexes refer to major private settlements involving 1,000 or more workers. The hourly earnings index applies to production and nonsupervisory workers in the private, nonfarm sector and is adjusted to exclude the effects of overtime in manufacturing and interindustry employment shifts. Compensation per hour applies to all employees in the nonfarm, business sector and includes private and legally required fringe benefits. Selected nonunion earnings are the weighted average percentage changes in average hourly earnings for the following industries: SIC 533 (variety stores), SIC 56 (apparel stores), SIC 57 (furniture stores), and SIC 60 (banking). Weights used are the levels of production and nonsupervisory employment in 1979.

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How can employers worldwide be experiencing increasingly severe labour shortages in the face of globalization? Why don't wages rise in expanding economies? This article argues that declining union power has allowed employers to take the upper hand, setting pay and other conditions of employment as they would in a monopsonistic labour market. Rejecting the perfect competition model matching supply to demand, the authors argue that, far from being a pedagogical curiosity, monopsony's imbalance in bargaining power is widespread. Employee voice needs to be restored to counter the undesirable consequences of strong macroeconomic performance, such as wage inequality and reduced worker rights.