The Interest of Others is about how workers use unions to advocate for their short term economic interests (favorable contracts) and their long term political interests (the relative power of workers). In a multi-method study, John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi use a formal model to guide their interpretation of historical documentation, interviews, comparative cases, an original survey, spatial data, and a rereading of the data in certain classic texts in the sociology of labor unions (e.g., Kimeldorf 1992). The project is an interesting revisit to a history that will be familiar to most scholars of unions. However, the framing of the behavior of unions that invest in the long-term political interests of workers as puzzling says more about the authors and their anticipated audience than it does about the behavior they observe (pp. 5, 185, 185 fn 2, 198, 219). For labor advocates, the ability to achieve economic interests depends on shifting the relative power between laborers and employers. How to pursue long term political interests has been a foundational and recurring topic within and among labor organizers and those who study them. In these authors’ retelling, the strategic achievements of workers’ increased power relative to corporations (and governments) are “unexpected benefits” (p. 230). The book is put forward as offering an alternative explanation for, rather than a development of, the theoretical arguments of most labor rights-based scholarship even while referencing the observations of scholars of labor and coming to conclusions similar to theirs.

The art of the book is in the authors’ reconciliation of two competing narratives about unions – that their leaders exploit workers and that they mobilize workers, not only in their own interests, but also in the interests of others. In their formal behavioral model union leaders extract rents, either income or “side payments” in the first instance or “adulation and power” in the second (p. 23). In the service of this art, the political struggles and political lessons of the history of labor unions such as the cold war politics of the first half of the twentieth century, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and the merger of the AFL-CIO in 1955 are understated.

The authors have two lines of argument and use different data to explore each. The first studies the “interests of others” as “political rents” to leaders in “activist” unions and specifies the conditions under which we would expect to see leaders and members acting in the interests of others. The second studies the development of “commitments to a larger public good” through changes in beliefs and the role that leadership plays in that process if governance institutions constrain leader power and support internal democracy. Both are ways of thinking about the conditions of leadership, governance, successful coordinated action, political context, and economic context that are conducive to the development of an expanded sense of “community of fate” by workers and their organizations’ (p. 2). The latter argument is consistent with and contributes to scholarship on labor advocacy and effectiveness.

Workers striking in the “interests of others” is not surprising or puzzling, but rather reflects one dominant view of successful labor strategy among many workers and unions throughout Ahlquist and Levi’s period of study. Recently, such commitments have been behind union support for the rights of domestic workers around the world (ILO Convention 189), garment workers in Bangladesh, the Ogoni people in Nigeria, and immigrant labor. Ahlquist and Levi highlight a guiding slogan of the ILWA: “An injury to anyone is an injury to all” (p. 79). This is also an organizing principle of the service workers (SEIU)^{Footnote 1} and steel workers (USW).^{Footnote 2} Workers know about the major initiatives of other unions and workers around the world and this knowledge is enhanced by union membership, as Ahlquist and Levi show. In addition, experience reinforces the value of and commitment to these strategies. This experience comes from work environment (working together on the docks), community building (meeting in union halls, living in neighborhoods), and success (the coast-wide strike of the ILWU or the citywide strike of the Minneapolis IBT), as Ahlquist and Levi show. An enlarged sense of community of fate has been part of union strategies to organize across employers, across industries, and across the globe throughout the history of worker activism. The surprise is that Ahlquist and Levi characterize activism in the interests of the larger conceptualization of community as a rent to leaders, when their own interviews, other actors, and other scholars characterize it as necessary for changing the relative power of workers and employers.

What strategies to take has been an axis of political tension within worker movements dating at least to the political context of Lenin’s Where to Begin? (1901) and What is to be Done? (1902). Posed at a time when workers had very little relative power and revisited after Taft-Hartley, these questions are critical today in the face of global capital and labor. Ahlquist and Levi do not answer them; they offer a behavioral model of why some unions answer them certain ways.

In their model, the extent to which a union is operating in a context of expanded community of fate is random (p. 187) and exogenous (p. 30). Workers do not behave as if they think their context is random and exogenous. They seek to change it. We could make certain aspects of context endogenous to the model by including two variables: the range of aligned partners (such as human rights organizations and environmental groups) and the power of non-aligned stakeholders (such as employers in other industries, governments of other countries).

This difference in the models’ specification affects the interpretation of the data and leads to more expansive predictions. For example, with globalization, the power of employers relative to workers has changed, as employers are able to credibly threaten to move production of parts or all of the supply chain to other countries. As Ahlquist and Levi agree, “A concerted attack on unions’ ability to attract and retain members is taking place among those advanced industrial polities where market competition is uncoordinated, that is, relatively unconstrained (Hall and Soskice 2001)” (p. 263). Such attacks occur in the global south as well. In this political economy, Ahlquist and Levi’s model predicts that those unions with communicative leadership, accountable governance, and reasonable success in delivering economic benefits for their members should have a broader sense of community of fate. The expanded model I propose adds a strategic prediction: With accountable union governance and continued pressures to reduce worker power relative to employers and governments, unions can be expected 1) to continue to broaden their “community of fate” by organizing across employers, across industries, across countries, and by expanding their membership, and 2) to diversify their methods for working with actors whose efforts are allied with theirs.

The data support the predictions of this alternative model. Unions broaden their communities of fate. For example, as mentioned above, unions have supported the ILO Convention for domestic worker rights and the right of the Ogoni people to hold Shell Oil responsible for human rights violations in Nigeria. Further, unions have expanded their partners to include other informal workers, social movement actors (in their garment worker activism) and other entities that work for worker rights, human rights, and environmental rights around the world (Simons, Herz, and Kaufman Reference Simons, Herz and Kaufman2010).

Although Ahlquist and Levi show that rent extraction could explain union leader behavior, the theory is a weak competitor against the theory of worker collective action through strategic alliance building manifest in the last century of worker organizing (e.g. Cornfield and McCammon Reference Cornfield, McCammon, Dyke and McCammon2010). The book encourages all of us to learn not just economic lessons about the import of long-term political power in short-term economic negotiations, but also political lessons that are as ethical as they are strategic: we are members of a community of fate whose boundaries seem increasingly difficult to perceive in the global political economy.