Jevons’s Ideal Role for Labor Unions as a Form of Co-operation

Monica Hernandez

No 1717, Working Papers from New School for Social Research, Department of Economics

Abstract: This research examines the ideas about labor unions found in William Stanley Jevons's works. I focus on the collaborative role Jevons envisioned for these organizations as part of a broader cooperative vision between workers and capitalists. Even though Jevons was not a supporter of labor unions and regarded them as monopolies with limited power to increase wages, on the one hand, and with great potential for generating dead losses of wages due strikes, on the other, he did not consider indispensable their elimination as long as they were guided to co-operate with business. This study concludes that there is more than one form of co-operation in Jevons’s thought. One explicit, from capitalist to workers, via profit sharing, and a second one, implicit, through the collaboration of workers to capitalists via their participation in labor organizations different than traditional labor unions. A major implication of this scheme is that both forms of co-operation have to be present for it to be beneficial for both classes. The latter, however, would not ensure that they are equally beneficiated.

Keywords: William Stanley Jevons; trade unions; profit sharing; co-operation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B1 B19 B3 B31 J01 J08 J5 J51 J52 J53 J54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-05, Revised 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-hpe, nep-lab and nep-pke
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:new:wpaper:1717

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