[Excerpt] Leo Troy is known for the penetrating questions he raises about the role of unions and the institutionalized collective bargaining system. A skeptical voice among industrial relations scholars, he was one of the first to proclaim the late twentieth century collapse of unions in the U.S. private sector. This book presents a no-holds- barred version of his thesis that irrepressible economic forces have overpowered legal protections to render unions obsolete. It is the third installment of Troy’s self-described “trilogy on labor relations in the United States.” Unfortunately, this is the weakest of the three, lacking both the thoroughness of The New Unionism in the New Society (George Mason University Press, 1994) and the insightfulness of Beyond Unions and Collective Bargaining (M. E. Sharpe, 1999). Little here is new, and missing is the measured analysis that characterizes Troy’s best work.