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The purpose is to evaluate the performance of consumers' cooperatives in the United States over the last 100 years. This evaluation is based on an overlooked series of surveys undertaken by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics between 1920 and 1950. Where possible, the series are brought up to date.

The surveys did not follow a single consistent organization. Therefore, the observations require rearrangement so that a single meaningful design is achieved.

In a number of instances, consumers' cooperatives have not merely survived but thrived. Indeed, some of their original and continuing methods of operation have been copied and adopted by firms that are not cooperatives.

The series constructed are original and singular. The author knows of no such comparable data.

This paper collects together quotations and extracts from 19th and 20th century thinkers who were little-known for being supporters of workplace democracy.

Over the past decade, Allan Cartter's model of the utility maximizing union and the institutional principles upon which it is based have provided the basis for much of the neoclassical study of union behavior. The most fundamental component of Cartter's model is the union's utility function, which is defined over the wage level and the level of employment. As drawn by Cartter, this utility function expresses two specific hypotheses: (1) The elasticity of substitution between the two arguments will be small; (2) The utility function defines a wage‐preference path that is kinked at the current wage level (Cartter, 1959, p. 90–91).

Constructing pseudo-panel data from successive Current Population Surveys, this paper analyzes earnings inequality in husband and wife families over the life cycle and over time. Particular attention is devoted to the role of labor supply in influencing measures of earnings inequality. Compact and accurate descriptions of earnings inequality are derived that facilitate the analysis of the effect of the changing market employment of wives on earnings inequality. The growing propensity of married women to work for pay has mitigated the increase in family earnings inequality. Alternative measures of earnings inequality covering people with different degrees of attachment to the labor market are constructed. Inferences about the extent and changes in earnings inequality are sensitive to alternative labor supply definitions especially in the case of wives.

Volume 12 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains eight papers that deal with contemporary and historical aspects of unionism and other forms of union representation, union-management relations, union political activity, labor market regulation, and interpretations of selected leading labor scholars’ writings about the evolution of welfare capitalism in the U.S. Four of these papers, by Daniel & Siebert, Borgers, Rubinstein, and Pereles, were winners of the 2002 AILR/Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA) “best papers” competition.¹

In the United States, there is little difference in annual income inequality and income mobility between the rural and urban sectors of the economy. This forms a sharp contrast with China where income inequality is greater and income mobility lower among rural households than among urban households. When incomes are averaged over three years and when adjustments are made for the size and composition of households, income inequality among all households differs little between China and the United States in the 1990s. Moreover when pooling rural households and urban households and when measuring annual income inequality and income mobility of the pooled households, the mobility of incomes of households in the United States differs little from that in China. Social welfare functions are posited that allow for a trade-off between increases in income and increases in income inequality. These suggest strong increases in well-being for urban households in China. The corresponding changes in rural China and in the United States are smaller. Four sets of data on households are drawn on to document these findings.

The topic of company unions – employee associations sponsored and organized by management – has generated strong feelings. For many years, conventional labor unions have been vehemently opposed to worker representation through company unions.¹ Conventional labor unions have viewed company unions as devices by management to forestall or thwart independent unionism (i.e. unions organized by workers).² According to this interpretation, a company union would give the appearance of providing employees with representation and induce workers to temper their demands for genuine collective bargaining. Thus, at their Annual Convention of 1919, the American Federation of Labor described company unions as “…a delusion and a snare, set up by the companies for the express purpose of deluding the workers into the belief that they have some protection and thus have no need for trade union organization: therefore be it Resolved, That we disapprove and condemn all such company unions and advise our membership to have nothing to do with them…” (Quoted in Douglas, 1919, p. 103).