ON THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN LABOR (original) (raw)
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The Future of American Labor: Reinventing Unions
Contexts, 2004
The U.S. labor movement is in deep trouble. Many assume that union decline is irreversible—the result of changes in the nature of work and unions' inability to adapt. However, American laws and corporate resistance are also responsible. New union tactics and militancy point toward a possible revival of a workers' movement.
Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Union Revitalization in the American Labor Movement
American Journal of Sociology, 2000
This article addresses the question of how social movement organizations are able to break out of bureaucratic conservatism. In-depth interviews with union organizers and other data are used to identify the sources of radical transformation in labor organizations by comparing local unions that have substantially altered their goals and tactics with those that have changed little. This analysis highlights three factors: the occurrence of a political crisis in the local leading to new leadership, the presence of leaders with activist experience outside the labor movement who interpret the decline of labor's power as a mandate to change, and the influence of the international union in favor of innovation. The article concludes by drawing out the theoretical implications of the finding that bureaucratic conservatism can sometimes be overcome in mature social movements.
Revitalizing Unions, Rebuilding Labor Studies
Mobilizing Against Inequality: Unions, Immigrant Workers, and the Crisis of Capitalism is an edited volume that provides case studies of unions organizing immigrant workers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The book, edited by Lee H. Adler, Maite Tapia, and Lowell Turner, contains details of cases where unions have allied with community organizations and other social movement partners to expand union access or political rights to immigrant workers. The authors draw lessons from the best case scenarios. This book also serves as an example of the kind of work labor studies scholars and institutes are pursuing.
Polity, 2010
When I came to graduate school after many years of working as a labor and community organizer, Labor in American Politics was one of those books, along with City Trenches, that explained the world to me. 1 J. David Greenstone was asking the questions I cared most about and, unlike much contemporary scholarship that placed firms and states at the center of inquiry but considered unions to have become largely irrelevant, he took a real interest in them, not just as ephemeral social movements but as institutions. 2 As an organizer in the 1980s and 1990s who had more experience with strengthening existing organizations than building social movements, I so appreciated his linkage of class to the actual organizational bureaucracies, structures, and cultures of the unions themselves. Labor was on the ropes and its political fealty to the Democratic Party and its reluctance to challenge
The Changing Landscape of US Unions in Historical and Theoretical Perspective
In certain states, most notably Wisconsin and Ohio, attempts have been made to eliminate public sector collective bargaining. Although the all-out attack on public sector unions is relatively new, it is best seen in the context of long-term trends. These include the long-standing assault on private sector unions; the ongoing conservative political critique of the public sector; and neoliberal policies that contract government services, deregulate virtually all economic activities, and privatize many government programs, as well as decreasing workers’ wages and benefits (allegedly to make them more globally competitive). The racial and gender dimensions of these trends are worthy of note and at times central to the narrative. We discuss these issues in detail, within the broader context of the role of unions in modern society and the history of labor organization in both the private and public sectors in the United States.
DENSITY MATTERS: THE UNION DENSITY BIAS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR LABOR MOVEMENT REVITALIZATION
After more than a decade of analyzing efforts to revitalize the U.S. labor movement, many have concluded that organized labor must become a movement again. Nevertheless, most analyses remain based on the traditional view that labor power is derived solely from the portion of the labor market that is unionized. This fact is illustrated by the continued use of union density as the primary means of assessing labor movement strength. This article examines this " density bias " and ways that it constrains analyses of labor revitalization— obscuring alternative sources of movement power, excluding community based labor organizations, and oversimplifying assessments of organizing processes. The article highlights the need for a critical assessment of conventional wisdom in labor studies and argues that treating labor as a social movement may generate new research questions and move theorizing in promising new directions. For decades, organized labor in the United States has been in a state of crisis. For students of the labor movement, the primary piece of evidence to support this assessment is the low rate of union density. In 2006, the portion of the workforce that was unionized stood at just 12 percent, representing the nadir of a decades-long decline (BLS 2007). For a dozen years, labor scholars, activists, and observers have sought ways to reverse this trend. These efforts have generated a vibrant collection of published research and theorizing about the prospects for a labor movement renaissance. Those working in this nascent field of labor revitalization are asking some difficult questions, reexamining old assumptions, and embracing strategic and analytic innovation. In a recent review of this discourse, Lowell Turner applauds these efforts, claiming, " revitalization researchers seek to cast new light on big questions " (Turner 2005: 394). Indeed, many of the basic assumptions on which orthodox labor studies have been grounded are being reexamined. Revitalization scholars have identified the need for new strategic orientations, attempted to broaden labor's traditional membership base, discovered more effective union organizing tactics, and explored the impact of globalization on the prospects of labor renewal. Yet, despite all of this self-examination, the conventional wisdom regarding the source of labor movement power has not been scrutinized. For scholars and practitioners alike, it is taken for granted that labor movement power rises and falls along with union density. This tacit assumption is so widely accepted that it appears to be self-evident that labor's transformation hinges on dramatically increasing the unionized share of the workforce. But given the current context in which labor movement scholars are revisiting the " big questions, " it is fair to challenge this assumption and to ask whether increasing union density is in fact necessary for labor movement revitalization. In the pages that follow, I take up this question and examine the analytic consequences of relying on union density as the principal means of assessing labor movement power and potential. I