Recently in Organizing Category

Source: Netsy Firestein, Deborah King,Katie Quan, Labor Project for Working Families, Cornell ILR Labor Programs and UC Berkeley Labor Center, July 2010

From a Berger-Marks summary:
How useful are online media and work-family issues in organizing? To find out, a Berger-Marks grant helped researchers interview 23 organizers about how they use new media and whether they highlight family and work issues in their campaigns.

The study confirmed that "some of the most exciting and innovative strategies and tools are being developed by young organizers using new technology and social media."

They are using Internet websites to provide information; Facebook and MySpace to help workers connect and express opinions; and Twitter and texts to remind workers to take action. Nonetheless, those same organizers caution that new technology and social media are no substitute for personal contact, and that unions need to make sure they protect workers' security and privacy.

The study concludes that "Organizers are using new technology and social media successfully. The immediate challenge for unions will be how to provide organizers with these tools, the skills to use them and the budget to maintain them." It recommends giving frontline organizers technical support and the authority to respond rapidly.

It also calls for "a new union culture that is attractive to young workers" and helps them take on leadership.

Source: DataCenter and the National Organizers Alliance, June 2010

From the summary:
At the 2010 US Social Forum NOA and the DataCenter released Sustaining Organizing: A Survey of Organizations During the Economic Downturn, an analysis of a survey conducted with 203 organizations engaged in community organizing and movement building work. The study looks at the impact of the recession on our work and resources.

The DataCenter and the National Organizers Alliance are conducting the Sustaining Organizing Study to document the impact of the economic downturn on organizing and movement building organizations. There already have been many studies and reports that have documented the impact on the non-profit sector as a whole. One study found that 9 in 10 organizations will not break even this year and that only 16% expect to cover their operating expenses in 2009 and 2010. Almost half of organizations are planning to manage the downturn through program reduction or elimination and staff or salary cuts. Our study aims to uncover how the downturn is affecting organizing and what strategies and best practices are being used to sustain the work through this period.

Source: Henry S. Farber, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), NBER Working Paper No. w16160, July 2010
(subscription required)

From the abstract:
The standard theoretical solution to the observation of substantial turnout in large elections is that individuals receive utility from the act of voting. However, this leaves open the question of whether or not there is a significant margin on which individuals consider the effect of their vote on the outcome in deciding whether or not to vote. In order to address this issue, I study turnout in union representation elections in the U.S. (government supervised secret ballot elections, generally held at the workplace, on the question of whether the workers would like to be represented by a union). These elections provide a particularly good laboratory to study voter behavior because many of the elections have sufficiently few eligible voters that individuals can have a substantial probability of being pivotal. I develop a rational choice model of turnout in these elections, and I implement this model empirically using data on over 75,000 of these elections held from 1972-2009. The results suggest that most individuals (over 80 percent) vote in these elections independent of consideration of the likelihood that they will be pivotal. Among the remainder, the probability of voting is related to variables that influence the probability of a vote being pivotal (election size and expected closeness of the election). These findings are consistent with the standard rational choice model.

Source: Steven Mellor and Lisa M. Kath, Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, published online: 16 July 2010
(subscription required)

From the abstract:
We modeled a macro-level relationship at a micro-level level to examine the effectiveness of anti-unionism in psychological terms. We reasoned that fear of reprisal for disclosing union interest in the work environment was an affective response to perceived anti-unionism and hypothesized that fear of reprisal would disrupt the prediction of expression of this interest among nonunion employees (N = 1,010). With financial strain as a predictor of interest and fear of reprisal as a moderator, disruption was found. The results of the model are discussed in terms of the unintended consequences of anti-unionism, which, we argue, can include stress effects among employees and healthcare cost effects among employers.

Source: Berger-Marks Foundation, 2010

In March 2010, the Berger-Marks Foundation invited 30 women activists to New Orleans for a candid conversation across generations about how unions can attract young workers, especially women, and support them in key leadership roles.

Out of frank discussions over two days comes this report, "Stepping Up, Stepping Back: Women Activists 'Talk Union' Across Generations" by Linda Foley, Foundation president. In it, problems are faced openly and solutions are suggested. Its content comes from work done in small groups, which separated into three age clusters, and plenary sessions. As Foundation trustees, we took notes as silent observers. We hope that unions will find this report useful and that it will contribute to academic research on intergenerational activism
See also:
- Summary
- Bibliography

Source: Helen Blank, Nancy Duff Campbell, and Joan Entmacher, National Women's Law Center, June 2010

From the summary:
Getting Organized: Unionizing Home-Based Child Care Providers 2010 Update, provides the latest in unionization developments for home-based child care providers across the country.

Every day, millions of working parents rely on home-based child care arrangements. Unionizing home-based child care providers, a poorly paid and overwhelmingly female workforce, is a promising strategy for improving the treatment of these providers and for increasing overall investments in child care.

Source: Alex Bryson, Rafael Gomez, Paul Willman, Labor History, Vol. 51 no. 1, February 2010
(subscription required)

From the abstract:
Union membership has declined precipitously in a number of countries, including in the United States, over the past fifty years. Can anything be done to stem this decline? This article argues that union voice is a positive attribute (among others) of union membership that is experiential in nature and that, unlike the costs of unionization, can be discerned only after exposure to a union. This makes the act of 'selling' unionism to workers (and to some extent firms as well) difficult. Supportive social trends and social customs are required in order to make unionization's hard-to-observe benefits easier to discern. Most membership-based institutions face the same dilemma. However, recent social networking organizations such as Facebook have been rather successful in attracting millions of active members in a relatively short period of time. The question of whether the union movement can appropriate some of these lessons is discussed with reference to historical and contemporary examples.

Source: Gregg Blesch, Modern Healthcare, Vol. 40 no. 16, April 19, 2010
(subscription required)

Repeatedly during the yearlong debate that led to last month's landmark healthcare reform law, President Barack Obama and others praised health systems that employ physicians and embrace their leadership and cooperation in giving patients coordinated, efficient care.

...But as more organizations look to emulate those successes... is it possible that executives will find themselves late one night staring across a table at their physician-employees in collective bargaining?

Source: Cornell University, 2010

From the summary:
As traditional industries decline, people are hiring into "informal and low-wage sectors" where turnover is high, legal protections are scarce, unions are rare, and workers tend to be immigrant women of color. Organizing such jobs is especially hard, because many people work in their homes or their employer's home, with no central workplace, and worry about their status in the U.S. Researchers used ideas from other Berger-Marks reports as the jumping-off point for a series of focus groups and roundtable discussions in 2008 and 2009, where workers and organizers, most of them women, talked about how they mobilized diverse and fragmented workforces, and the experiences of women in unions. The Berger-Marks Foundation funded the project.

Source: Ben Sachs, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 123, 2010

From the abstract:
The proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has led to fierce debate over how best to ensure employees a choice on the question of unionization. The debate goes to the core of our federal system of labor law. Each of the potential legislative designs under consideration -- including both "card check" and "rapid elections" -- aims to enhance employee choice by minimizing or eliminating managerial involvement in the unionization process. The central question raised by EFCA, therefore, is whether enabling employees to limit or avoid managerial intervention in union campaigns is an appropriate goal for federal law.

This Article answers this foundational question in the affirmative. It reaches this conclusion by conceptualizing federal labor law in terms of legal default rules, drawing in particular on the preference-eliciting default theory of statutory interpretation and the reversible default theory from corporate law. Doing so leads to the argument that card check, rapid elections, and similar mechanisms are best understood as "asymmetry-correcting altering rules" -- means of mitigating the impediments that block departure from the nonunion default. Understanding EFCA in this way also requires that we ask how such an altering rule should be constructed. This Article addresses this institutional design question by arguing that card check's open decisionmaking process is flawed and that rapid elections, while an improvement over the status quo, are an insufficient method of mitigating the relevant impediments to employee choice. Accordingly, this Article offers two new designs -- alternatives to both card check and rapid elections -- that would accomplish the legitimate function of minimizing managerial intervention while at the same time preserving secrecy in decisionmaking.