Source: David Cohen, Labor Notes, #352, July 2008
The question of raiding - one union convincing members of another union to decertify and join the competitor - has been a hot-button issue once more this year in the labor movement.
Source: Stephanie Luce and Eve Weinbaum, New Labor Forum, Vol. 17, Issue 2, Summer 2008
The labor movement's future success depends on its ability to organize increasing numbers of workers of color and women workers who are concentrated in low-wage jobs. Scholars and activists have focused on questions of how to organize these workers, how to promote women's activism and develop leadership, and how to diversify union staff and leaders to better represent the workers they are organizing. If organizing low-wage women workers is essential, then we need a better understanding of who these women workers are, and what they are doing. Who makes up this low-wage workforce? Where do they work? How do we define low wages? What has worked to raise wages and improve working conditions for these women--job training, career mobility, organizing? And what are unions doing to address the needs of this group of workers?
Source: Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, New Labor Forum, Vol. 17, Issue 2, Summer 2008
Once known as "the invisible workforce," the nation's 1.4 million home health care aides and 1.8 million home child care providers are changing the face of organized labor. These frontline caregivers meet the personal needs of those requiring assistance, from children, to the elderly, to the disabled. Disproportionately African American, Latina, and immigrant women, these low-waged workers seized national attention in 1999 when 74,000 Los Angeles home health care aides voted to enter the SEIU, pulling off the largest successful union drive since the sit-down strikes of the Great Depression. Six years later, nearly 50,000 Illinois home child care providers followed in their footsteps. In less than a decade, hundreds of thousands of home-based care workers have entered into coalitions with parents, senior citizens, and disability activists. They poured into SEIU, AFSCME, and AFT, but also responded to community organizing efforts of ACORN, local grassroots groups, such as Brooklyn's Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, and occupational associations, such as Milwaukee's Providers Taking Action.
Source: Food & Water Watch
A new report by consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch arms consumers with the facts about a major player in the meat business, Smithfield Foods. The group's new report, The Trouble With Smithfield: A Corporate Profile, details the damage the world's largest pork producer has caused to the environment, animal welfare, public health, family farmers, and workers around the world.
The company's opportunistic acquisitions and the failure of the federal government to enforce anti-trust laws have allowed Smithfield to dominate almost all aspects of pork production and processing.
The factory farms that the company owns or controls cram hundreds or thousands of pigs into long, warehouse-like barns. And all those hogs generate lots of waste. In 1997, the company received one of the largest Clean Water Act fines in history for failing to install adequate pollution control equipment.
In addition to environmental damage, Smithfield operations threaten the health of people living nearby who suffer from a wide range of ailments, including asthma, allergies, eye irritation, compromised immune function, depression and other disorders.
The Trouble With Smithfield: A Corporate Profile
Full Report (PDF; 1.2 MB)
Source: Richard W. Hurd, New Labor Forum, Vol. 17 no. 1, Spring 2008
Over the past ten years there has been a notable shift in union organizing strategies. Once the exception, organizing conducted under the umbrella of negotiated neutrality agreements has become the preferred method in the drive to reverse decline and build union density.
Source: New Labor Forum, Fall 2007
By Kate Bronfenbrenner and Dorian T. Warren
The future of the U.S. labor movement hinges on unions' ability to organize workers of color, women, and most especially, women of color. The majority of existing union members, and for at least the last two decades, the majority of new workers organized, are women and workers of color. Yet, with the exception of just a handful of unions, the labor movement has been slow to realize that its survival and revitalization is fundamentally intertwined with unions' ability to recognize and build on this trend.
Source: Labor Studies Journal, December 2007
By Jonathan L. Kaplan, et al.
A study was conducted to evaluate medical residents' attitudes toward unionization and to measure issues a residency union might pursue. Medical residents are in a transitory state between graduate student and working professional, giving them little voice in the workplace. It is possible that medical residents could be the next "niche" area for unions seeking to grow their membership. A Web-based survey was e-mailed to residents throughout the country. There were 578 responses, with residents strongly desiring health and malpractice insurance as well as free parking. The results also showed that although 82 percent would consider joining a union, only a third would help organize and form that union. Given these conflicting results, the unionization of medical residents would require new organizing techniques geared specifically for these employees.
Source: Labor Studies Journal, December 2007
By Jennifer Bickham Mendez and James O'Neil Spady
The authors analyze the practices and internal dynamics of a living wage campaign (LWC) at a liberal arts university to evaluate its implications for low-wage workers' social and economic justice struggles. A vibrant coalition among faculty members, students, and staff members demonstrated the complexities of organizing across racial, class, and status differences when participants hold different stakes. The campaign's diverse membership was its greatest strength and challenge, as campaigners brought with them key resources but also divergent understandings of the LWC's meaning and ultimate goals. Although the LWC's efforts at engaging in participative decision making, building relationships, and developing compatible frameworks of meaning created a culture of solidarity that invigorated the movement despite multiple obstacles, they were not sustainable. The campaign's dissolution and ultimate reformation as a union with a very different culture and practice raises questions about the strengths and limitations of LWCs and their implications for a revitalized labor movement.
Source: Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal (via SSRN)
Employer captive audience meetings (CAMs) are a rare example in which people in a democratic society are forced to listen to opinions of others with which they may strongly disagree. Employees are not chained to a post, but they are nevertheless economically compelled to listen to their employer's anti-union opinions. The uniqueness of being compelled to listen makes the CAM a powerful signaling device through which the message of economic vulnerability is transmitted to employees. The medium (CAMs) is its own message, and it should be regulated as such. The author explores the extent to which this approach is reflected in current labor law, and finds that the principle approach to CAMs in Canadian labor law is to treat CAMs as "message neutral" event that can "color" the content of the speech made in the meeting. He argues for an approach that treats the CAM as an independent signaling device. This approach would refocus the labor boards' attention on the question of whether CAMs interfere with the formation of unions, and whether permitting employer CAMs advance sound labor policies that are consistent with the values underling the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Source: Tiffany Ten Eyck, Labor Notes, #344, November 2007
If you happen to be scanning the radio dial near two unique towns in the United States, you could stumble across something unusual: FM radio run by and for farmworkers. In Woodburn, Oregon and south central Florida, farmworkers have added low-power community radio to their organizing arsenal.
Source: Art Levine, In These Times, Vol. 31 no. 10, October 2007
"If you thought the union movement was in decline--Think Again!" So read an online ad for a recent seminar in Las Vegas that promised to help me remain union-free. Actually, I had thought the union movement was in decline, but I'm an open-minded sort, so I was willing to be persuaded otherwise. I paid my $1,595 and signed up. Organized by seminar-specialty firm Executive Enterprises, it would be led by attorneys from Jackson Lewis, one of the leading law firms in the field of union-busting, which has become a multibillion-dollar industry encompassing more than 2,500 lawyers and consultants offering their services. The classes would take place in the Las Vegas Westin Casuarina, which promises its guests "a sanctuary in the midst of bustling excitement" as well as craps, blackjack and three-card poker. I booked a room.
Source: Sharon Pinnock, WorkingUSA, Vol. 10 no. 3, September 2007
(subscription required)
All discussions with people on the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO (AFGE) campaign to organize federalized airport screeners--reclassified in 2006 as "Transportation Security Officers" (TSA), ultimately end with the adage that the mobilization effort is righteous. The author, who has organized over fifty organizing campaigns in nearly thirty years as a labor organizer, has never before worked on a unionization drive that feels as righteous as that to organize TSA workers.
Source: Tiffany Ten Eyck, Labor Notes, no. 340, July 2007
Young people aren’t entering the labor movement in large numbers these days. In 2005, less than five percent of workers aged 16-24 were in unions, while workers 65 and older enjoyed the highest increase in unionization. At Labor Notes’ recent San Jose Troublemakers School, young workers and longtime union members got together to talk about how to overcome the obstacles preventing the labor movement from reaching young workers.
Source: Timothy D. Chandler and Rafael Gely, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, Vol. 10 no. 2, June 2007
(subscription required)
A major complaint of the Change to Win Coalition ("Coalition") is the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations’ failure to "follow the work" and allocate sufficient resources to organizing, particularly in industries experiencing job growth. Our article uses industry-level data from National Labor Relations Board-supervised elections from 1970 to 2000 to evaluate the validity of this criticism. We find support for the Coalition's claim. Most industrial groups faired better than manufacturing in election outcomes. Yet union organizing activity was lower in other industries. Moreover, declining organizing activity within manufacturing suggests that other industries, most notably services, account for an even greater share of new entrants into the labor movement.
Source: Rafael Gely and Leonard Bierman, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 20 no. 2, Spring 2007
Times have changed. Americans, and particularly American workers, live in a much more socially isolated world than they did in the past. Union halls and employee group bowling are rare these days. In some respects, the Internet and today’s “virtual world” have contributed to these developments. For example, when employees are telecommuting or working “virtually” off-site, developing a strong sense of community with their colleagues is far more difficult. But while the Internet may be part of the problem, it also has the potential to be part of the solution.
One doesn’t have to possess an advanced degree in economics to see that there is something definitively out of alignment when it comes to job creation in the United States. Multinational corporations with no national, much less local, allegiances are given billions of dollars in tax subsidies in a shell game, which moves an ever-shrinking number of manufacturing jobs from city to suburbs, and state to state. Big box retail stores are destroying locally owned small businesses in shopping districts across the country, and the largest employment growth is taking place in low-paying service sector jobs. Real wages are stagnant and fundamentals, such as overtime pay, health insurance, retirement benefits, job security, even regular paid vacation, are swirling away at hurricane speeds.
Articles include:
Economy in Crisis
· The Fight for Quality Jobs: Our Battle Against Neoliberalism
· The Great Corporate Job Scam: Money for Nothing
· The Economic Crisis Ahead
· Fastest Growing Jobs of '06: Are You Handy with Bedpans and Brooms?
· Are Bad Jobs Good for Poor People? The Wal-Mart Question
· Healthy Jobs for All: What Will It Take?
Economy in Transformation
· Rising from Below: Immigrant Workers Open New Organizing Fronts
· Blacks and Immigrants: More Allies Than Adversaries
· The Poor People’s Campaign: Non-Violent Insurrection for Economic Justice
· Black and Brown: The United Colors of Low-Wage Workers
· Flint
· Paving the Road Out of Poverty
Economic Impacts
· Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation
· Toxic Sentence: Captive Labor and Electronic Waste
· Racism in United States Welfare Policy
· From Welfare to Low-Wage Work
· Home Is Where the Work Is: The Color of Domestic Labor
Organizing
· Worker Centers
· The Workplace Project
· No Justice, No Growth: How L.A. Makes Developers Create Decent Jobs
· Sweatshops on Wheels: Union-Community Coalition Takes Aim at Port Trucking
· Sewing Alliances: Anti-Sweatshop Activism in the United States
· Growing Local Food into Quality Green Jobs in Agriculture
Case Studies
· Health Industry Jobs Help Build Healthy Economy
· Green Jobs Corps in Oakland
· Painting Boston Schools for a Fair Wage
· Quality Work Through Self-Employment
· One Million Good Jobs
· Work Work Work