Dennison defended British trade unions as props of the market economy

Evidence

Sharing Hunold’s concern was Stanley Dennison, an English economist who along with Hayek shouldered responsibility for preparing the whole 1949 meeting on labor participation. As Dennison argued in his own paper, English joint labor-management control could be considered to be quite successful on one point. It had indeed proved an acceptable way to prevent the arbitrary intervention of the British Ministry of Labor in the conduct of business, which “contains a worst threat to our social order than does a good deal of monopoly in a labour market which is still essentially organised as a balance of opposing forces… . Here I find my sympathies in Britain with the trade unions however much their monopolistic tendencies, together with many of their policies, are to be deplored, in the main they are still, in Britain at least, one of our bulwarks against worse evils; and, paradoxically enough they are one of the few remaining props of a market economy in labour” (Dennison 1949, 10). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 963

Categorization

• XREF: This pragmatic pro-union stance from within the MPS complicates the narrative later developed about Chicago-school hostility to unions; connects to the reader’s interest in historiographical challenges to received views. — connects to: Large union membership made British unions prudent and conservative
• QUESTION: Worth chasing how this ‘unions as bulwark against the state’ position squared with the MPS’s later decisive anti-union turn — what shifted between 1949 and the 1980s?

Broader Connections

• Large union membership made British unions prudent and conservative #expands (0.82)