Organizing to Win


Book Description

As the American labour movement mobilizes for a major resurgence through new organizing, this text presents research on union organizing strategies. The introduction defines the context of the current climate and subsequent chapters include community-based organizing and building




Union Mergers in Hard Times


Book Description

The past fifteen years have been difficult for the labor movements in industrial countries. Gary N. Chaison addresses questions implicit in the decline of unions in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand: How and why do labor unions merge under pressure? What role do mergers play in the unions' strategies to deal with membership losses, management opposition, and hostile governments? Are there distinctive national profiles of union mergers? Chaison begins by describing the dynamics of the union merger process as large unions combine with each other in amalgamations, as small unions are absorbed into larger ones, and as local unions affiliate into nationals. He discusses the reasons for mergers, the barriers to consolidation, and the problems of integration which may result. The five chapters that follow are arranged in order of increasing intensity in merger activity, ranging from the United States, where interest in mergers is growing, to New Zealand, where changing legislation has catalyzed an enormous wave of mergers. For each of the five countries considered, Chaison characterizes the industrial relations climate and merger record since 1980, explains landmark mergers, identifies the antecedents, and assesses the chances that a sudden flood of mergers will occur. The final chapter compares the national profiles, extrapolating the significant differences and common threads. Chaison concludes that while mergers can play a critical role in revitalizing labor movements and building the dominant unions of the future, they are not necessarily solving the fundamental economic and political problems that plague unions.







Organizing in Hard Times


Book Description

One of America's poorest cities copes with economic restructuring.




Trade Union Strategies against Healthcare Marketization


Book Description

Marketization in the healthcare sector affects the quality and delivery of care, as well as healthcare workers’ working conditions. Based on a comparison of England and Germany, along with an in-depth case study looking at New York, USA, this volume examines how trade unions respond to marketization processes and the determinants of successful strategies. The author draws on a rich empirical study to develop a theoretical framework that accounts for sector-specific opportunity structures stemming from marketization processes and on the relevant unions’ local-level leeway that opens if they build up and mobilise the available resources and capacities. The book identifies determinants of successful trade union strategies, explains the puzzling observation of similar strategic choices across different systems, and draws conclusions for prospects of trade unionism in the marketized healthcare sector. This book emphasizes the transformative effect of marketization on healthcare and the opportunities this change creates for unions, while giving special attention to the local-level conditions of trade unionism in the analysis of conflicts evolving around marketization in the hospital sector. It is of interest to academics and practitioners working in healthcare management, human resource management, and employment relations.




Workers in Hard Times


Book Description

Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor. Since the Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers and the welfare state. The volume ends with an examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the instability and privation of the nineteenth century. The essays in this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges, and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless. Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.




Workers in the Margins


Book Description

'Marginalised' workers of the late twentieth century were those last hired in times of plenty and first fired in times of recession. Often women, Maori, or people from the Pacifc, they were frequently unemployed, and marginalised within the union movement as well as the labour force. WORKERS IN THE MARGINS tells the story of these workers in the tumultuous years of post-war New Zealand. These were years characterised by massive changes in the workforce, as it expanded to accommodate a growing urban Maori population and an increasing desire for women to enter paid work. The world of trade unions and employment conflicts, such as the 1951 waterfront lockout, was vigorous and challenging. As free market policies deregulated the labour market and splintered the union movement toward the end of the century, Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, the national unemployed and beneficiaries' movement, gave a new voice to 'workers in the margins'. The people of this history come to life through oral histories - from the poet (and boilermaker) Hone Tuwhare building a palisade at Orakei through to activists Sue Bradford and Jane Stevens working with the unemployed in the 1980s and '90s. Their experiences speak to the lives of many workers of the early twenty-first century.




Reorganizing the Rust Belt


Book Description

Publisher Description




The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America


Book Description

Against a broader backdrop of globalization and worldwide moves toward political democracy, The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America examines the unfolding relationships among social change, equity, and the democratic representation of the poor in Latin America. Recent Latin American governments have turned away from redistributive policies; at the same time, popular political and social organizations have been generally weakened, inequality has increased, and the gap between rich and poor has grown. Hanging in the balance is the consolidation and the quality of new or would-be democracies; this volume suggests that governments must find not just short-term programmes to alleviate poverty, but long-term means to ensure the effective integration of the poor into political life. The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America bridges the intellectual chasm between, on the one hand, studies of grassroots politics, and on the other, explorations of elite politics and formal institution-building. It will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Latin American politics and society and, more generally, in the vicissitudes of democracy and citizenship in the late twentieth-century global system.




Building More Effective Unions


Book Description

Paul F. Clark believes union leaders should take advantage of the valuable discoveries made in behavioral science to make their organizations more effective and, in Building More Effective Unions, he offers an accessible and straightforward account of how they can do so. The second edition provides an updated discussion of important lessons behavioral science holds for labor organizations. It also provides new examples of how unions and their leaders have benefited from putting the principles outlined in the first edition into practice.