Robert Flanagan on boosting union membership and why orchestras struggle financially

Robert Flanagan, the Matsushita Professor of International Labor Economics and Policy Analysis Emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business joins the podcast to discuss what he’s learned both studying and working for unions, how his time in a musician’s union inspired him to research financial difficulties in the performing arts, and more.

In this episode, Flanagan and Ashenfelter discuss: 

• How Flanagan’s membership in the musician’s union, as a high school student, inspired his interest in labor economics.
• Why, after a brief stint at the Labor Department, Flanagan decided to pursue a Ph.D. at Berkeley, where he studied under Lloyd Ulman.
• Flanagan’s experience working as a business agent for a union at the Oakland Naval Supply Center during grad school, where he learned one of the best ways to inspire union membership. “I took on a low probability grievance and won it, and suddenly we had several hundred additional members.”
• Flanagan’s experience working for Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, and some of Flanagan’s most famous work, including his research on the role that collective bargaining plays in the aggregate efficiency of the labor market.
• Why Flanagan organized a seminar at Stanford called “The Economic Survival of the Performing Arts,” which among other things explores why, according to Flanagan, “even the most artistically accomplished orchestras always seem to be living on the edge financially.”

Robert Flanagan holds both an MA (1966) and a Ph.D.(1970) in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced as Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section) celebrates its 100th anniversary—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.