Trade unionism in Western Europe has undergone substantial transformation since the golden age of tripartite concertation in the 1950s and 1960s. Trade Unions in Western Europe is a rich and comprehensive account that outlines these changes and the challenges that trade unions currently confront. The book explores four primary bonds that trade unions hold with various groups/actors: those with their members, with employers, with governments, and with civil society. The authors provide both an overview of general trends affecting trade unionism across Western Europe and a more microscopic view of national experiences that summarize the diversity of ways that trade unions have fared in retaining their organizational capacity and in representing their members’ (and the public’s) best interests.

There is much to like about this book. Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman summarize broad and narrow literatures across the fields of industrial relations, sociology, and political science that have addressed the nature of the relationships that trade unions share with the four parties mentioned earlier. This book contains something for everyone who has an interest in studying certain facets of the labor movement. It covers a range of topics, from the general (unions’ revitalization amid organized labor’s decline, their capacity to mobilize power resources, their political exchanges with governments through social pacts, and the like) to the specific (how and why unions have negotiated mergers, outreach measures unions have used to cater to specific vulnerable and difficult to organize groups, and so forth). Moreover, I found it particularly refreshing that this book does not merely summarize what we already know about trade unionism, but also provides updates and reassessments of the wider literature based on trade unions’ actions in the 2000s and 2010s, which remains relatively unexplored and understudied. Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman’s comprehensive manuscript is a one-stop shop for students and scholars seeking to understand past, present, and future economic, organizational, and political trends affecting trade unions.

Although this book will undoubtedly be a valuable reference for all concepts related to trade unionism, I had two concerns with its approach. First, it is largely descriptive rather than inferential. The authors spend a great deal of time describing trade union strategies and preferences across diverse national systems, rather than outlining deductive or theoretical frameworks that explain what makes unions effective in achieving their desired objectives. When the authors do make attempts to provide theoretical frameworks (for example, in Chapter 8, in which they provide a theoretical paradigm of how unions’ ideological divisions coupled with the diversity of interests among their membership influence collective leadership), they are overly cautious in doing so and are quick to offer disclaimers, such as “this is a stylized model because reality is far more complex than any four point typology” (p. 195). Given the substantial expertise of the authors, I felt that they could have been bolder in advancing these frameworks, which not only are helpful in explaining the past but also provide a useful construct in which to understand trade unionism in the future.

Related to its descriptive nature, the book is also highly focused around details rather than a more substantial analysis of what makes trade unions successful in responding to old and new challenges. Chapter 7, for example, in which the authors explore unions’ conduct on the international stage, is heavily loaded with documentations of individual union confederations’ involvement in international confederations and their views toward European integration. These lengthy descriptions provide the authors with limited space in dissecting the more substantial issues they unpack later in the chapter, such as the power struggles that trade unions have encountered with a neoliberal-minded European Commission and European Court of Justice, as well as problems with supranational coordination attempts to limit social and wage dumping within the European (Monetary) Union. Even though the microscope certainly reveals important heterogeneity within the trade union movement, taking a “the world is complicated” approach limits the extent to which the authors can address and advance more comprehensive theories of trade union successes and failures in their interactions with their members, employers, governments, and civil society.

My second misgiving about the book relates to its relative pessimism about trade unionism in an age of financial and debt crisis, and the period of austerity that succeeded it. The authors are absolutely right in their assessment of unions falling on hard times as globalization and the rise of neoliberalism contain their political effectiveness. Aside from brief references in the text, however, the authors fail to consider silver linings for unions within the current crisis. The financial crash of 2008 was an effective demonstration of the failures of capitalism, and the era of austerity that followed was deeply unpopular among European electorates. These catastrophic failures may provide unions with new ways to cater to outsiders and increase their political appeal. Recent literature on general strikes against welfare reforms (Hamann, Johnston, and Kelly Reference Hamann, Johnston and Kelly2013a, Reference Hamann, Johnston and Kelly2013b; Lindvall Reference Lindvall2013) suggests that unions have been effective in using old political tools to mobilize the wider general public against unpopular neoliberal policies and there-is-no-alternative reformist-minded governments. The fact that organized labor may possibly be the only tripartite actor that is not responsible for the current crisis grants unions more political credibility than big business and pro-market governments run amok. This credibility may prompt the general public to view these vested interests more favorably as swords of justice in the current political climate, granting unions greater political leverage.

These two concerns aside, this book is a valuable resource for the understanding the roots of trade unionism in Europe, its postwar belle époque, and the challenges it faces today. It is a must-have reference for any student or scholar who requires a general understanding of, or details on more specific minutiae about, organized labor in Western Europe.