The Unions and the Democrats


Book Description

Illuminates the inner dynamics of labor's relationship to the American political system over the past generation.




We Are the Union


Book Description

In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly relevant case study. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders. We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs. Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.




The Unions and the Democrats


Book Description

Although labor unions have faced a decline in membership in recent decades, they have not necessarily lost their political clout. The Unions and the Democrats illuminates the inner dynamics of labor's relationship to the American political system over the past generation. It examines organized labor from the Johnson administration through the 2000 elections, showing that labor's alliance with the Democratic Party has endured despite changes in the economy and the revival of conservatism.Drawing on extensive interviews with union leaders and lobbyists, Taylor E. Dark provides a historical perspective often lacking in studies of union political involvement. He compares the relationship of presidents Johnson, Carter, and Clinton with labor and analyzes cases of union involvement in legislative lobbying, executive decision-making, and both congressional and presidential elections.The book explores such topics as the effects of political reform on union power, the development of union legislative goals, and the impact of unions on economic policymaking, and also evaluates the controversy over union campaign spending in the 1996 elections. It demonstrates that labor's evolving alliance with the Democrats continues to shape America.




The Democratic Aspects of Trade Union Recognition


Book Description

The long ascendancy of pluralism and 'collective laissez-faire' as a guiding ideology of British labour law was emphatically shattered by the New Right ideology of Thatcher and Major. When New Labour was finally returned to power in 1997, it did not, however, attempt to resurrect the pre-Thatcher preference for pluralist non-intervention in collective industrial relations. Instead, it purported to follow a 'Third Way'. A centrepiece of this new approach was the statutory recognition provision, introduced in Schedule A1 TULRCA 1992. By breaking with the tradition of voluntarism in respect of re.




The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy


Book Description

We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.




Rank and File Rebellion


Book Description




The Politics of Advanced Capitalism


Book Description

This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a 'return of electoral and coalitional politics' to political economy research.




Listen, Liberal


Book Description

From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats? It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming. With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.




More Than They Bargained For


Book Description

parliamentary maneuvers, a camel slipping on icy Madison streets as union firefighters rushed to assist, massive nonviolent street protests, and a weeks-long occupation that blocked the marble halls of the Capitol and made its rotunda ring. Jason Stein and Patrick Marley, award-winning journalists for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covered the fight firsthand. They center their account on the frantic efforts of state officials meeting openly and in the Capitol's elegant backrooms as protesters demonstrated outside. Conducting new in-depth interviews with elected officials, labor leaders, cops, protestors, and other key figures, and drawing on new documents and their own years of experience as statehouse reporters, Stein and Marley have written a gripping account of the wildest sixteen months in Wisconsin politics since the era of Joe McCarthy.




Defending the Swedish Model


Book Description

Across Europe the prospect of a rapidly shrinking workforce has put increased labor migration back on the political agenda However for many on the political left concerns exist that less restrictive labor migration policies threaten core features of the social democratic project. This is perhaps clearest in Sweden which in late 2008 adopted a liberal approach to third-country national labor migration allowing employers to hire freely from outside the European Union. Defending the Swedish Model explores the debate leading up to this reform focusing on the preferences of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish trade union confederation (LO). While generally positive to the economic potential of increased labor migration these allies remained highly skeptical toward calls from employers and bourgeois parties for liberalization Gregg Bucken-Knapp argues that the SAP and LO develop their labor migration policy preference on the basis of whether specific reform alternatives are perceived as being consistent with or as undermining the Swedish model in the case of third-country nationals both allies considered liberalization a threat to full employment aims instead seeking to preserve an influential role for the state labor market board and organized labor. Bucken-knapp also focuses on the Swedish labor migration debate prior to the 2004 enlargement of the European union showing how SAP concerns over potential abuse of the universal welfare sate led to its support for transitional arrangements defending the Swedish model illuminates the challenges faced by social democrats and trade unions when considering the need for increased labor migration Book jacket.