Is Labor Union Corruption Special?

Corruption is a general term that encompasses, and masks, different kinds of breaches of trust and breaches of fiduciary duty. The conference at which the articles appearing in this volume were presented focused mainly on governmental officials in the developing world soliciting or accepting bribes to award contracts, licenses, and other benefits to foreign-based companies. All contributors recognize, however, that everyday internal domestic corruption (sometimes called “petty corruption”) is part of the culture that sustains high-level corruption (sometimes called “grand corruption”), and that corruption is, in many ways, as significant a problem in the developed world as it is in the developing world. One corruption context in the United States is the long history of corruption by labor union officials who extract rents from unions in violation of the rights and interests of union members. We suggest that corruption as a field of study would benefit from specialized subfields that document and analyze corruption patterns in different social, political, and economic contexts, such as health care, insurance, banking, charity, education, politics, and, as discussed here, labor.