FOR several reasons, What Do Unions Do? 1 by Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff is the most significant book on the topic in recent years. The theses are provocative, including a number favorable to unions. The authors are prominent, as members of the Harvard Economics Department. The arguments have been previewed elsewhere, such as in the 1979 article in The Public Interest on" The Two Faces of Unionism." And the current presentation is accessible to a general audience. The result is a book that has been praised by scholars such as John Kenneth Galbraith and John T. Dunlop and reviewed in popular media such as The New York Times and Business Week. These factors explain our special treatment of the book: a brief summary followed by a series of comments by prominent scholars. The central message of Freeman and Medoff (F&M) is that there are two faces to unions—one with largely undesirable consequences for society and one with largely beneficial results—and the empirical evidence demonstrates that the bene-