This short book asks excellent questions and presents interesting results from a survey of Canadian and U.S. attitudes toward unions, as well as useful data on union membership, but its explanation of the contrasting trajectories of organized labor on either side of the border is unconvincing. The core problem is Seymour Lipset and Noah Meltz's cultural theory that the two countries have different political and social value foundations—“social democratic” Canada and “libertarian” America—which do not change but explain the post-1964 divergence of union membership in the two countries.

Canada's rate of union membership in 2001 was about the same as it had been 30 years before, almost triple the current U.S. rate. The U.S. rate in the private sector has dropped to a level not seen since the Wagner Act in 1935. Lipset and Meltz analyze the decline of union membership in the United States in a comparative context not only with Canada but also with other highly developed countries, and they assess a variety of factors that have been used to explain cross-national patterns. The Canada-U.S. comparison is especially useful because the countries seem to have many similarities, namely, language (Quebec aside), social norms that do not support equality (p. 62), substantial economic integration, and capitalist authority (rather than corporatism and planning) (pp. 24, 62). The authors find that the factor most strongly associated with greater union membership is the extent of “left-party” participation in government. The “primary source” for Canadian-U.S. union differences after 1960 is the parties that were in power—social democratic parties in Canada and libertarian ones in the United States. This difference, in turn, reflects the underlying values in each country (pp. 27–28, 75). Union growth in the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s was an “anomaly” associated with the crisis of the Great Depression.

The authors' theory, which has deep roots not only in previous comparative studies from Lipset's distinguished career but in consensus theory in American politics and labor studies, is hobbled by a sharp distinction between values and facts, which makes it impossible to link broad values to specific historical developments. This leads them to make ad hoc arguments and unsupported assertions. The general characterization of the United States as libertarian or “laissez-faire” (p. 64) has to accommodate 150 years of slavery and white supremacy, which is a major component of the party and electoral systems that the authors advert to as explanatory variables, the constraints on working-class agency in the common law, extensive regulation (though not public ownership) of industry, and the primacy of managing U.S. world power after World War II, among many other complications. In contrast, one might follow Karen Orren's Belated Feudalism (1991) and consider the Wagner Act's protection of workers' rights of association the culmination of laissez-faire, rather than a social-democratic detour.

But there is another puzzle. Lipset and Meltz find that American workers today are significantly more positive toward union membership than are Canadians, and yet they join at a much lower rate. What is the source of “frustrated demand (supply-side barriers)” (p. 96) for union membership? Their answer is that collective action is limited by “American” culture values that emphasize “individual freedom,” reinforced by congressional government, debilitating legal regulation of unions, and an election system that makes it difficult to change labor policy (p. 6, Chap. 4). Pro-union attitudes do not change cultural values or government policy, except when they do, apparently, as in the 1930s. Would it not be just as plausible and testable to hypothesize that some Americans are effectively denying others their freedom of association? Might there not be conflicts over employment and income security in the United States? After all, the Human Rights Watch report on the United States, Unfair Advantage (2000), documents widespread employer interference with workers' liberties. Lipset and Meltz consider the hypothesis of managerial hostility, but dismiss it by reporting their data that American managers are less likely to have anti-union attitudes than Canadian managers (pp. 59, 83). They anticipate that readers will object that “attitudes” are not as important as anti-union actions, but they argue that it is society's values that make anti-union actions effective, rather than the degree of manager anti-unionism (pp. 86, 92). As with the New Deal, they do not consider that there is more than one way that values may be deployed to respond to a crisis or that workers might gain as well as lose the political power to act.

Consider a road mentioned but not taken. The Quiet Revolution in Quebec contributed to an increase in union membership in Canada in the 1960s (p. 48). The liberation of French-speaking workers from domination by English speakers and the Catholic Church was associated with union mobilization. Nothing like this happened in the United States, they observe. What about the black workers in the American South at the same time? The comparison did not escape Quebecois militants, as suggested by Pierre Vallieres's famous book, White Niggers of America (1971). Was not Martin Luther King assassinated while helping striking black workers? What happened to Bayard Rustin's multiracial social-democratic coalition? Should an explanation of union decline not inquire why blacks gained their civil rights but not their union rights? The bypass is odd because Lipset and Meltz present data on American union membership by state, which shows a pronounced regional pattern to the “frustrated demand” (pp. 103, 115). It is hardly sufficient to answer that “the U.S. emphasis on individual freedom” (p. 175) accounts for all outcomes.

A useful comparison can be based on national culture that examines the specific national political context of each case. Yet the book skims American political development (Chapter 3), with slight attention given to cross-cutting issues and values, the employment and welfare consequences of the policies that sustain the unique position of the United States in world markets and politics, the determination of Reagan Republicans to roll back the New Deal's social-democratic achievements and substitute a “values” agenda, the huge increase in incarceration of working-class black men, the denial of workers' rights to many immigrant workers, and so on. Despite a lot of interesting information, the analysis in The Paradox of American Unionism is disconnected and unfinished.