Vanessa Tait, Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor From Below (original) (raw)
2007, Qualitative Sociology
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The paper analyzes the decline of labor movements in the U.S. over the past sixty years, focusing on the historical trajectory and contemporary struggles for poor workers' rights. Vanessa Tait's work highlights the transition from manufacturing to service industries, examines the significant relationship between past civil rights movements and current labor organizing, and underscores the importance of revitalizing the labor movement to empower poor workers. The need for new strategies and grassroots organizing to consolidate labor power amid economic challenges is emphasized.
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T oday union density, the proportion of workers who are union members , is just 12 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2007, 1). Long the standard by which the health of the labor movement is measured, union density in the United States has declined steadily since 1970, when nearly 30 percent of workers were unionized (Working Life n.d.). For more than a decade, observers of the U.S. labor movement have been searching for answers to explain the long decline in labor movement power and proposing strategies for its revitalization. For the most part, trade unions have remained the central unit of this analysis. Whether labor scholars seek ways to strengthen unions or labor activists debate the strategies and tactics that will lead to increased union membership, unions are the labor movement's constitutive organizational form. As a consequence, the contributions of community-based organizations, worker centers, and other types of labor organizations operating in the space outside of the traditional collective bargaining framework are effectively excluded from analyses of the contemporary labor movement. This union bias is both analytically and strategically problematic. First, since unions remain highly gendered institutions, it tends to focus our attention toward the organizing efforts of men, who continue to dominate the unions. Second, unions are often unable or unwilling to organize low-wage workers in economic sectors where traditional collective bargaining is not seen as viable. As a result, we labor scholars fail to incorporate into our analyses the efforts to organize some of the most marginalized workers. While the union membership gap between men and women has narrowed in recent years and women are gaining entry into the upper leadership echelons of labor's national federations, men still dominate the ranks of organized labor. This may be explained as a remnant of unions'
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