Book Review: The role of unions in the twenty-first century

The years surrounding the millennium have seen a cluster of publications taking stock of the current, somewhat parlous, position of trade unions and predicting their possible future. This volume is a worthy further contribution to that debate, putting forward some original arguments and investigating areas of trade union activity relatively devoid of attention. It is not an edited book as such. Rather, it reproduces two separate, multi-authored, reports on European trade unions, which were first compiled for a conference hosted by the Italian Fondazione Rodolfo Debendetti in 2000. The two reports discuss the role of unions in, firstly, wage determination processes and collective bargaining and, secondly, in the very timely subject of pension and welfare reform. Each document has been updated in preparation for this book, but the volume also includes a number of discussants' brief comments on the reports and broader issues raised. Tito Boeri, Agar Brugiavini and Lars Calmfors (eds), with Alison Booth, Michael Burda, Daniele Checchi, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Richard Freeman, Pietro Garibaldi, Bertil Holmlund, Robin Naylor, Martin Schludi,Thierry Verdier and Jelle Visser, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, £45.00, xv + 304 pp.