Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement

Book Description

"In order to recruit new members on a scale that would be required to significantly rebuild union power, unions must fundamentally alter their internal organizational practices. This means creating more organizer positions on the staff; developing programs to teach current members how to handle the tasks involved in resolving shop-floor grievances; and building programs that train members to participate fully in the work of external organizing. Such a reorientation entails redefining the very meaning of union membership from a relatively passive stance toward one of continuous active engagement."—from the Introduction

In Rebuilding Labor Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization. Throughout this collection, the focus is on the formidable challenges unions face today and on how they may be overcome. Rebuilding Labor begins with a comprehensive overview of recent union organizing in the United States; goes on to present a series of richly detailed case studies of such topics as union leadership, organizer recruitment and retention, union democracy, and the dynamics of anti-unionism among rank-and-file workers; and concludes with a quantitative chapter on the relationship between union victories and establishment survival. This interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on New Labor offers a window into an otherwise invisible emergent social movement.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book for Union Organizers!.......2007-05-07

This book is a good reference tool for the novice Union Organizer. I recommend it highly. It goes over alot of stuff you already know, but it is good to be reminded of such!

Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the Twenty-First Century (Frank W. Pierce Memorial Lectureship and Conference Series, No. 11)

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Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the Twenty-First Century (Frank W. Pierce Memorial Lectureship and Conference Series, No. 11)

Manufacturer: ILR Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Labor Policy | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0801487129

New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840-1918

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New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840-1918

Manufacturer: Slavica Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Russia | History | Subjects | Books

Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle (New Perspectives on the History of the South)

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Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle (New Perspectives on the History of the South)
John A. Salmond
Manufacturer: University Press of Florida
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Labor & Industrial Relations | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0813027039

Book Description

Comparing two major 20th-century movements for reform, John Salmond explores parallels between the fight of white textile workers for economic justice and the pursuit of racial equality by black southerners. He argues that their separate efforts illustrate the dark underside of Southern history--the failure of class to override race in the struggle for political, industrial, and social democracy.

Salmond maintains that white workers in southern mills in the 1930s and 1940s shared common goals with black activists in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He identifies similar leadership styles, sources of motivation, and strategies of protest. For both groups, he says, church leaders and religious imagery offered inspiration, and women achieved critical leadership roles, especially at local levels, that have been long ignored. Tragically, both movements were strongly opposed by vigilantism and organized community violence. "Those who challenged the social order did so at the daily risk of their lives," he writes. Whether white or black, those determined to bring about change faced equally determined resistance to change from the upwardly mobile white middle class.

Local law enforcement officials were often the common enemy of both union organizers and civil rights workers, as were the state court systems. Salmond describes three violent incidents in which lives were lost and no one was held accountable: the Marion, North Carolina, textile strike in 1929, when county deputies fired tear gas into a crowd and then shot workers as they fled, hitting most in the back; the Honea Path, South Carolina, mill strike in 1934, which gave state governors the opportunity for widespread use of the national guard to maintain public order; and, in 1968, the Orangeburg, South Carolina, shootings of unarmed African American students protesting the failure of a local merchant to conform to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Book Description

Focusing on Alabama's textile industry, this study looks at the complex motivations behind the "whites-only" route taken by the Progressive reform movement in the South. In the early 1900s, northern mill owners seeking cheaper labor and fewer regulations found the South's doors wide open. Children then comprised over 22 percent of the southern textile labor force, compared to 6 percent in New England. Shelley Sallee explains how northern and southern Progressives, who formed a transregional alliance to nudge the South toward minimal child welfare standards, had to mold their strategies around the racial and societal preoccupations of a crucial ally-white middle-class southerners.

Southern whites of the "better sort" often regarded white mill workers as something of a race unto themselves--degenerate and just above blacks in station. To enlist white middle-class support, says Sallee, reformers had to address concerns about social chaos fueled by northern interference, the empowerment of "white trash," or the alliance of poor whites and blacks. The answer was to couch reform in terms of white racial uplift--and to persuade the white middle class that to demean white children through factory work was to undermine "whiteness" generally.

Sallee discusses how the child-labor problem was tackled by southern middle-class whites within their own prevailing ideas about race, family, and gender. This approach discounted many of organized labor's concerns about safety, fair wages and hours, and workers' rights, Sallee says. Although it did create an entrée for women to participate in the public sphere, the lingering effect of a "whites-only" strategy was to reinforce the idea of whiteness as essential to American identity and the politics of reform. This study will enrich our interpretation of reform, racism, and political compromise in the Progressive-era South.

Customer Reviews:

A must-read!.......2004-01-07

Equal in depth and description to Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives", Ms. Sallee's new book gets at the heart of an issue that troubles many of us today in this modern age. Hopefully, this won't be the last we hear from Ms. Sallee.

A New Labor Movement for the New Century

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Ignores key issues of class, race, and gender
New Labor Movement or New Labor?
Strong on idealism, limited realistic assessments

A New Labor Movement for the New Century

Manufacturer: Monthly Review Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Labor Policy | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0853459371
Release Date: 1998-01-01

Book Description

"This spirited collection is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to know what it will take for unions to inspire and mobilize a mass movement that will transform our nation, deepen our commitment to justice and democracy, and promote the inclusiveness that is key both to the labor movement and sustained economic growth."

--Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.,President, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

Customer Reviews:

Ignores key issues of class, race, and gender.......2006-01-22

How could a book about labour ignore the most important issues of social class, race, and gender? The book is really a collection of rah-rah essays on unions in America lacking in any analysis and rigor about the lives of workers in the U.S. An obsequious effort to gather all perspectives without taking a position. Why is there no critical examination of issues of race in this work? The work does not have any essay by rank-and-file workers and seems to see the unions moving ahead by continuing in their old ways.

New Labor Movement or New Labor?.......2005-02-21

The editor provides a wide selection of essays on the subject of the potential growth of American labor in the United States without substantiating any real insurgency. While hindsight is always 20-20, we now see that labor has declined since the publication of this book, perhaps the book's optimism and lack of critical analysis is its major weakness. The labor movement cannot rely on empty phrases. The writers are drawn from well known new left academics and labor leaders that optimistically predict a rosy future for a new revitalization of the American labor movement. Unfortunately, the editor takes for granted the writers' assertions that are unsubstantiated without a critical analysis. Labor has clearly changed from the cold war era. However, no nuance is detected here, given that exhortation does not bring about revival nor does it make it true that organized labor has emerged from its past bureaucratic and territorial character. The book is interesting, but larded with hubris and hopeful expectations. More helpful would be a prospective assessment of labor's problems. If readers are interested in what labor intellecuals were thinking in the aftermath of Sweeney's rise to power, this book provides interesting commentary. To understand how a new labor movement is constructed, the editor and authors must understand how capital remakes labor.

Strong on idealism, limited realistic assessments.......2002-10-03

The labor movement in the U.S. in 1994 was reeling from at least two decades of shrinking membership and loss of political and economic influence. The election debacle in the Fall of 1994 was the final blow that forced an acknowledgement that their leadership and manner of operation were hopelessly ineffectual. The new "New Voice" leadership of the AFL-CIO, elected in 1995, hit the ground running with ambitious aims for a labor turnaround. In a decided change from past practice, John Sweeney, the new president of the AFL-CIO, called for open debate and a critique of the labor movement from both within and without the labor movement. This volume contains the input of 27 individuals who participated in a labor symposium in anticipation of the transition. If not officials in labor unions, almost all of the contributors work within the labor movement in some capacity.

These contributors all see the traditional union approach of firm-centered collective bargaining conducted by union officials and staffers as a guaranteed prescription for further union decline. But what do they think the labor movement should be doing or become? Their emphasis is on organizing both for workplaces and within communities, on the inclusion and expansion of opportunities for ethnic and gender minorities both in terms of membership and leadership positions in unions, on the impact of globalization and its main strategic initiative neoliberalism on working people throughout the world, on the need for renewed and independent political action, and on counterpoising worker democracy and solidarity against what amounts to the class warfare of capitalism.

There is a great deal of idealism and optimism but unfortunately not a lot of realism and pragmatism that permeates this collection. Of course, that is somewhat understandable in that the New Voice leadership has given the labor movement renewed hope of a turnaround.

Perhaps the vaguest notion put forward in these essays is the notion that unions, or the labor movement, need to become some sort of society-wide institution concerned with issues of the working class in general regardless of union membership. This concept is termed social movement or community unionism. One tactic proposed is for the labor movement, itself a rather vague concept, to form coalitions with social and political groups. Except in a few inner-city areas there is hardly any overlap between specific workforces and geographic communities. Despite the fact that some union-community coalitions have been successful, there is no discussion of the feasibility or the mechanics of unions becoming broad social institutions in most communities.

There is general recognition from most of the authors that political power is essential to advance the position of working people. Disassociation from the Democratic Party and independent political action is urged. But what is lacking is any real assessment of the political orientation of the working class. One author comments on the lack of coherent political thinking among working people. It seems that the notions of social movement unionism and political power are intertwined in some manner but at this point this seems to be more of a partially formulated ideal than a possibility.

Advocacy of greater inclusion of immigrants and ethnic and gender minorities can hardly be disagreed with. But the huge increase in semi-professional and technical workers, who are largely unrepresented, is ignored by these authors. What little overlap there is between workplaces and communities most probably exists among immigrants and ethnic groups. Perhaps the labor movement, as a practical matter, sees the potential for recruitment of members as far greater in these urban areas.

Given the background of the contributors, it is understandable that there is no commentary on the entire structure of workplace representation. Much union representation is based on fairly sizeable groups of workers with common functions, a situation that does not pertain in hundreds of thousands of workplaces. The European system of legislated workplace-based works councils that are in turn of a part of supra-works councils makes a lot of sense. The consultation and codetermination aspects of works councils go a long way toward the workplace democracy that some of the authors advocate. Throw in tri-partite discussions at the highest levels of the works councils and the potential exists for a representation system that exceeds the sparse, rather ad hoc, and limited system of union representation in the U.S.

Book Description

This study explores a tradition of interracial unionism that persisted in the coal fields of Alabama from the dawn of the New South through the turbulent era of World War I. Daniel Letwin focuses on the forces that prompted black and white miners to collaborate in the labor movement even as racial segregation divided them in nearly every other aspect of their lives.

Letwin examines a series of labor campaigns—conducted under the banners of the Greenback-Labor party, the Knights of Labor, and, most extensively, the United Mine Workers—whose interracial character came into growing conflict with the southern racial order. This tension gives rise to the book's central question: to what extent could the unifying potential of class withstand the divisive pressure of race?

Book Description

Change, Continuity and Class offers the reader the most up-to-date synthesis and critical evaluation of current and recent debates in modern British social and labor history. Issues of change and continuity, class, gender and difference, and the overall place and role of labor in modern British society constitute the central concerns of the book. The author takes issue with recent linguistic and liberal "turns," vigorously making the case for the centrality of class and change to modern history. A selection of documents usefully illustrates the main themes of the book.

The Chartist Movement: A New Annotated Bibliography

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The Chartist Movement: A New Annotated Bibliography

Manufacturer: Mansell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0720121779

Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Gender and American Culture)

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Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Gender and American Culture)
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Women | Specific Groups | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

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Economic History | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0807825271
Release Date: 2000-03-29

Book Description

Offering fresh insights into the history of labor policy, the New Deal, feminism, and southern politics, Landon Storrs examines the New Deal era of the National Consumers' League, one of the most influential reform organizations of the early twentieth century.

Founded in 1899 by affluent women concerned about the exploitation of women wage earners, the National Consumers' League used a strategy of "ethical consumption" to spark a successful movement for state laws to reduce hours and establish minimum wages for women. During the Great Depression, it campaigned to raise labor standards in the unregulated, non-union South, hoping to discourage the relocation of manufacturers to the region because of cheaper labor and to break the downward spiral of labor standards nationwide. Promoting regulation of men's labor as well as women's, the league shaped the National Recovery Administration codes and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 but still battled the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment threatened sex-based labor laws.

Using the National Consumers' League as a window on the nation's evolving reform tradition, Civilizing Capitalism explores what progressive feminists hoped for from the New Deal and why, despite significant victories, they ultimately were disappointed.

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