An illustration of the successful use of a coercive strategy for solving a public goods
problem in the United States is the organization of workers in the mass production industries in
the 1930s. Prior to the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 and the Supreme Court's ruling
affirming its constitutionality, attempts to organize mass production workers, by and large, had
failed. Union organizers constantly were thwarted, on the one hand, by the free rider problem (i.
e., workers could benefit from collective organization whether or not they contributed to the
union) and, on the other hand, from tightly organized employer groups. The Wagner Act
permitted workers to coerce themselves into paying dues to a union if the majority of members in
a shop voted for union recognition. This "closed shop" provision eliminated the free rider
problem. In addition, the Wagner Act further strengthened the countervailing power of the
unions vis-à-vis management by creating a new institutional mechanism, the National Labor
Relations Board, which ensured that voting would operate without management's interference.20
In terms of bridging social capital, it would appear that coercive strategies are most likely
to be successful when the "latent group" to be organized consists of an aggregate of individuals
whose main connection to one another is their economic interest. In some situations, individuals
may be unlikely to build bridges to one another and the outside world, in this case management,
unless there is some type of formal institutional enforcement mechanism in place. A typical
misdiagnosis of this type of situation is that individuals are not organizing collectively because
of some cultural elements that make them apathetic or alienated. A more parsimonious
explanation, however, may be that their failure to build bridging ties to one another is due to the
absence of formal institutional mechanisms that would ensure that beneficiaries of public goods,
such as better security and services, make some type of individual contribution to collective
10