Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication
- Publication Type
- File Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 50
Full-Text Articles in Business
An Overview Of Collective Bargaining In The United States, Lance A. Compa
An Overview Of Collective Bargaining In The United States, Lance A. Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] American history reflects a long cycle of trade union decline and growth. Analysts routinely predict the death of the labor movement. (Yeselson 2012). Heralds of labor’s demise often argue that unions were needed in the past, but modem, enlightened management and the need for economic competitiveness make them obsolete. (Troy 1999). But then, workers fed up with employers’ exploitation decide to find new ways to defend themselves. History does not repeat itself, and conditions now are not the same as those spurring the great organizing drives of the 1930s and ‘40s. Still, American workers have shown deep resourcefulness over …
Solidarity And Rights: Two To Tango: A Response To Joseph A. Mccartin, Lance Compa
Solidarity And Rights: Two To Tango: A Response To Joseph A. Mccartin, Lance Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] Thanks to Joseph McCartin for advancing this debate with an insightful critique of the workers’-rights-as-human-rights framework and for his generous treatment of the series of Human Rights Watch reports in which I had a hand. McCartin so fairly presents the human rights case, even while disagreeing with it, that it’s hard to respond without simply borrowing from his framing of my own views. But I’ll try.
China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement, Ching Kwan Lee, Eli D. Friedman
China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement, Ching Kwan Lee, Eli D. Friedman
Eli D Friedman
[Excerpt] The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen movement, albeit as subordinate partners to the students, labor activism since then has been almost entirely confined to the working class. While the ranks of aggrieved workers have proliferated (expanding from workers in the state-owned sector to include migrant workers) and the forms and incidents of labor activism have multiplied, there is hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, we observe that a long-term decline in worker power at …
Workplace Change And The New Labor Movement, James Rundle, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Workplace Change And The New Labor Movement, James Rundle, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] The authors of this set of papers sharply critique, from a variety of perspectives, the approach to workplace change that has dominated labors thinking for decades. We have not attempted to balance these criticisms with arguments that labor can grow and prosper by fostering win-win methods and outcomes, because those arguments are well-known from a wide range of publications. Instead, we hope that these papers will stimulate and broaden the debate over a critical arena that has not been integrated with labor's new ambitions.
Introduction To The Pullman Strike And The Crisis Of The 1890’S, Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, Nick Salvatore
Introduction To The Pullman Strike And The Crisis Of The 1890’S, Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
The strike of Pullman carshop employees and the subsequent boycott that disrupted rail traffic throughout the territory west of Chicago in June-July 1894 marked the culmination of nearly two decades of the most severe and sustained labor conflict in American history. Yet until very recently little new scholarship has focused on the meaning of the Pullman strike and its historical context. By offering a close reading of contemporary perceptions of the strike and by examining the organizational and political continuities and discontinuities the Pullman conflict reveals, these essays resituate the strike in its historical context. They demonstrate that Pullman played …
What Do Unions Do? Comment, David B. Lipsky
What Do Unions Do? Comment, David B. Lipsky
David B Lipsky
[Excerpt] In What Do Unions Do?, F & M gather together an impressive amount of evidence showing that unions are on net beneficial for society. This book will not end the debate over whether unions are good or bad for society, but it represents a milestone that will surely influence the course of the debate in the future.
Do International Freedom Of Association Standards Apply To Public Sector Labor Relations In The United States?, Lance A. Compa
Do International Freedom Of Association Standards Apply To Public Sector Labor Relations In The United States?, Lance A. Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] After November 2010 elections in the United States, human rights aspects of labor policy suddenly emerged at sub-federal levels. Elections in many states brought a sharp turn to conservative Republican rule. In this new climate, conflicts over workers’ rights took shape not at the ozone layer of high international policy, but at the oozing landfill level of local labor politics. Governors and legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and other states moved to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights, blaming their wages and benefits for budget shortfalls. A vindictive North Carolina legislature made it unlawful for public school …
Contemporary Issues In Employment Relations—A Roundtable, David Lewin, Adrienne E. Eaton, Thomas A. Kochan, David B. Lipsky, Daniel J. B. Mitchell, Paula B. Voos
Contemporary Issues In Employment Relations—A Roundtable, David Lewin, Adrienne E. Eaton, Thomas A. Kochan, David B. Lipsky, Daniel J. B. Mitchell, Paula B. Voos
David B Lipsky
For the 2006 LERA research volume, leading scholars were assembled in a roundtable for the purpose of eliciting their views on key contemporary industrial relations issues. The roundtable members were Adrienne E. Eaton, professor and director of labor extension in the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations; Thomas A. Kochan, the George M. Bunker Professor of Management and director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research in the MIT Sloan School of Management; David B. Lipsky, the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Dispute Resolution and former dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University; …
Contemporary Issues In Employment Relations—A Roundtable, David Lewin, Adrienne Eaton, Thomas Kochan, David Lipsky, Daniel Mitchell, Paula Voos
Contemporary Issues In Employment Relations—A Roundtable, David Lewin, Adrienne Eaton, Thomas Kochan, David Lipsky, Daniel Mitchell, Paula Voos
David Lewin
For the 2006 LERA research volume, leading scholars were assembled in a roundtable for the purpose of eliciting their views on key contemporary industrial relations issues. The roundtable members were Adrienne E. Eaton, professor and director of labor extension in the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations; Thomas A. Kochan, the George M. Bunker Professor of Management and director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research in the MIT Sloan School of Management; David B. Lipsky, the Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Dispute Resolution and former dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University; …
Ever Expanding Responsibilities: Upstream And Downstream Corporate Social Responsibility, Judith Schrempf-Stirling, Guido Palazzo, Robert A. Phillips
Ever Expanding Responsibilities: Upstream And Downstream Corporate Social Responsibility, Judith Schrempf-Stirling, Guido Palazzo, Robert A. Phillips
Management Faculty Publications
The debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been on the public and academic agenda for several decades. In general, CSR issues can be divided into production-related issues (along the supply chain - or how things are made) and consumption-related issues (towards the consumer and society at large - or how things are used). Following the terminology of Phillips and Caldwell, upstream CSR refers to the CSR debate along the supply chain, and downstream CSR refers to corporate responsibility towards consumers and society at large. The chapter examines current CSR issues, and proposes a social connection model to …
Workers’ Rights: Rethinking Protective Labor Legislation, Ronald G. Ehrenberg
Workers’ Rights: Rethinking Protective Labor Legislation, Ronald G. Ehrenberg
Ronald G. Ehrenberg
This paper focuses on a few directions in which protective labor legislation might be expanded in the United States over the next decade and the implications of expansion in each area for labor markets. Specifically, it addresses the areas of hours of work, unjust dismissal, comparable worth, and plant closings. In each case, the discussion stresses the need to be explicit about how private markets have failed, the need for empirical evidence to test such market failure claims, the need for economic analysis of potential unintended side effects of policy changes, and the existing empirical estimates of the likely magnitudes …
The Decline Of Labor: A Grim Picture, A Few Proposals, Nick Salvatore
The Decline Of Labor: A Grim Picture, A Few Proposals, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] The social context of this four-decade decline challenges a central assumption of the cyclical theory. More than a third of the decline occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, decades of broad economic growth and, for the 1960s, of liberal Democratic ascendancy. Labor lost another 15 percent during the stagflation of the 1970s, despite the Democratic return to power in the wake of a discredited Republican administration. By the 1980s, when a structurally weakened labor movement faced Ronald Reagan, plant closings and demands for concessions accelerated the decline. Organized labor's absolute and proportional decline over decades in which the labor …
[Review Of The Book For Democracy, Workers, And God: Labor Song-Poems And Labor Protest, 1865-95], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book For Democracy, Workers, And God: Labor Song-Poems And Labor Protest, 1865-95], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] In this slim book, Clark D. Halker raises a series of complex and interrelated issues. Focusing on some 4,000 song-poems that appeared in the labour press in the late 19th century, Halker states that his purpose is to "expand knowledge of the musical and poetic history of the American working class;" to use these song-poems and their poets as "a lens into the larger world of Gilded-Age workers and labor protest;" and more specifically to examine the contours of a "movement culture" that, he acknowledges (14), was never coterminous with the whole of the working-class cultural experience. The result …
[Review Of The Book Perspectives On American Labor History: The Problems Of Synthesis], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Perspectives On American Labor History: The Problems Of Synthesis], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Over the past two decades many claims have been made for what was once called the "new" labor history. Deeply influenced by European scholarship (especially by the British historian, E. P. Thompson) and by writings in cultural anthropology and sociology, this new history seemed to sweep all before it. In a tumble of discrete community studies and precise examinations of individual strikes lay the foundation of the new history's critique of the work of John K Commons and his associates, who had stressed an institutional analysis of labor's growth and development within a liberal, democratic capitalist society. In studying …
[Review Of The Book Meatpackers: An Oral History Of Black Packinghouse Workers And Their Struggle For Racial And Economic Equality], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Meatpackers: An Oral History Of Black Packinghouse Workers And Their Struggle For Racial And Economic Equality], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] The Halpern and Horowitz volume, Meatpackers, follows creditably in this oral history tradition, even if it does not approach the power and complexity of Rosengarten's work. Instead of focusing on one individual, the book presents selections culled from a massive collection of oral interviews conducted by the authors with more than 125 former members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). The interviewees are black, white, and Hispanic, male and female, with records of activism in the union as far back as the 1930s and as recent as the 1980s. The events they recount occurred in five cities, …
[Review Of The Book Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers In Chicago, 1919-1939], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers In Chicago, 1919-1939], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] This is a superb book. Lizabeth Cohen has attempted nothing less than a major reinterpretation of how industrial workers became deeply involved with the union organizing drives of the 1930s. Rather than focusing on external stimuli such as governmental actions, Cohen explores in great detail the ways in which changes in working people's own attitudes allowed them to be participants in, indeed makers of, their New Deal. Her themes are critically important, broadly conceived, and explored with imagination and verve. Her extensive research matches her intellectual vision, and she sensitively uses such diverse sources as advertising agency memoranda, early …
[Review Of The Book ”Big Bill” Haywood], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book ”Big Bill” Haywood], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] This brief biography of William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, the charismatic leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) between 1905 and 1918, is an engaging introduction to Haywood's life. Although the volume was not intended to supplant Peter Carlson's Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (1983) or Melvyn Dubofsky's own impressive We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (1969), this biography effectively sketches a number of the central juxtapositions that framed Haywood's life.
Introduction To Seventy Years Of Life And Labor: An Autobiography, Nick Salvatore
Introduction To Seventy Years Of Life And Labor: An Autobiography, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Samuel Gompers remains a central figure in American history during the society's most intense capital development. The choices he made from the possibilities he perceived were of great importance at the time and still influence the organization he founded. Despite his many achievements, however, the larger aspects of the qualities of his leadership remained weak. In his search for acceptance, he jettisoned the vision of working class unity that had motivated him in the 1870s and 1880s. The K of L slogan, that "an injury to one is the concern of all," Gompers dismissed, a casualty of the polemics …
Institutional Pressures, Human Resource Strategies, And The Rise Of Nonunion Dispute Resolution Procedures, Alexander Colvin
Institutional Pressures, Human Resource Strategies, And The Rise Of Nonunion Dispute Resolution Procedures, Alexander Colvin
Alexander Colvin
The author investigates factors influencing the adoption of dispute resolution procedures in the nonunion workplace. Various explanations are tested using data from a 1998 survey of dispute resolution procedures in the telecommunications industry. The results suggest that both institutional pressures and human resource strategies are factors driving the adoption of nonunion procedures. Among institutional factors, rising individual employment rights litigation and expanded court deferral to nonunion arbitration have led to increased adoption of mandatory arbitration procedures in the nonunion workplace. At the same time, an older institutional factor—union substitution by nonunion employers aimed at avoiding union organizing—continues to inspire the …
Rethinking Bargaining Unit Determination: Labor Law And The Structure Of Collective Representation In A Changing Workplace, Alexander Colvin
Rethinking Bargaining Unit Determination: Labor Law And The Structure Of Collective Representation In A Changing Workplace, Alexander Colvin
Alexander Colvin
[Excerpt] Arguably the leading issue for current labor law research is whether the existing system of law based on the Wagner Act model can continue to be relevant and appropriate for the contemporary workplace. Changes in the environment of work during the over half-century since this model was developed have brought pressures for re-evaluation and adaptation of key elements of its structure. Criticism of this system has focused on a number of areas, including: the reliance on the formal grievance procedure and arbitration; the separation of the realms of collective bargaining and business decision making; the limitations on employee participation …
From Supreme Court To Shopfloor: Mandatory Arbitration And The Reconfiguration Of Workplace Dispute Resolution, Alexander Colvin
From Supreme Court To Shopfloor: Mandatory Arbitration And The Reconfiguration Of Workplace Dispute Resolution, Alexander Colvin
Alexander Colvin
[Excerpt] In a series of court battles during the 1990s, employers successfully defended the use of mandatory employment arbitration against challenges that the procedures inherently undermined the statutory rights of employees. Efforts to introduce legislation in Congress aimed at reversing the Gilmer decision were unsuccessful. In 2001, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its acceptance of mandatory arbitration to resolve employment disputes in Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams. However, some courts have been willing to strike down arbitration procedures that contain particularly egregious violations of due process. For example, courts have refused to enforce arbitration agreements that restrict employee damage awards, …
Organizational Primacy After The Demise Of The Organizational Career: Employment Conflict In A Post-Standard Contract World, Alexander Colvin
Organizational Primacy After The Demise Of The Organizational Career: Employment Conflict In A Post-Standard Contract World, Alexander Colvin
Alexander Colvin
[Excerpt] There is a contradiction at the heart of dispute resolution in the contemporary workplace. The locus of determination of the terms and conditions of employment, including processes for the resolution of disputes concerning these terms and conditions, has become increasingly decentralized to the organizational level, at the same time that long term attachment of employee careers to these same organizations has been diminishing. The result is a disconnect between the nature of current employment disputes, which increasingly involve issues relating to entry to and exit from relationships with organizations, including questions of the formation and content of employment contracts, …
A War Against Organizing, Kate Bronfenbrenner
A War Against Organizing, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] Unless Congress passes serious labor law reform with real penalties, only a small fraction of the workers who seek union representation will succeed. If recent trends continue, there will no longer be a functioning legal mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and collectively bargain. Our country cannot afford to make workers defer their rights and aspirations for union representation any longer.
Organizing For Keeps: Building A Twenty-First Century Labor Movement, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Organizing For Keeps: Building A Twenty-First Century Labor Movement, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] In the last several years a great deal of discussion has taken place both inside and outside the labor movement about the need for American unions to organize massive numbers of unorganized workers. Who exactly this target workforce should be, ranging from low-wage contingent workers in home care, janitorial, or food service occupations, to the legions of unorganized clerical workers in business services, to the expanding professional and technical workforce in our "high tech" economy; to both skilled and unskilled production workers in the light manufacturing plants which have sprouted up across the South and rural Midwest, remains a …
Unions And The Contingent Work Force, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Unions And The Contingent Work Force, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] Unions seeking to organize the unorganized face increasing numbers of part-time, temporary and leased employees. These contingent workers now make up more than a quarter of the American work force. Of the new work force they are the least organized and perhaps the most difficult to organize. But they are also the group most in need of the protections, benefits and representation that a union can provide. There have always been some service industries such as hotel, health care and retail, that have maintained a large contingent work force because of long hours and fluctuating demand. Also there have …
Introduction To Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory And The Revival Of American Labor, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Tom Juravich
Introduction To Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory And The Revival Of American Labor, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Tom Juravich
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] When the Ravenswood Aluminum Company locked out seventeen hundred workers on October 31, 1990, it hardly looked like a big opportunity for labor. In what had become standard operating procedure for employers during the 1980s, management broke off bargaining with the United Steelworkers of America, and then brought hundreds of replacement workers into a heavily fortified plant surrounded by barbed wire and security cameras. Injunctions prevented union members from doing little more than symbolic picketing, and the wheels of justice, as they had done for more than a decade, creaked ever so slowly. All the pieces were in place …
[Review Of The Book International Labour Standards And Economic Interdependence], Gary S. Fields
[Review Of The Book International Labour Standards And Economic Interdependence], Gary S. Fields
Gary S Fields
[Excerpt] What can be done to raise the living standards of working people around the world? This collection of 29 essays focuses on an issue currently in the air: the setting of international labor standards. Although the writers come from every continent and represent employers, workers, government, and academia, virtually all favor international labor standards. One should perhaps not be too surprised by this agreement, given that the volume is published under the auspices of the International Institute for Labour Studies, a sister organization of the ILO. Things get interesting when the authors stop lamenting how tough conditions are for …
Trade Unions And Human Rights, Lance Compa
Trade Unions And Human Rights, Lance Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] In the 1990s the parallel but separate tracks of the labor movement and the human rights movement began to converge. This chapter examines how trade union advocates adopted human rights analyses and arguments in their work, and human rights organizations began including workers' rights in their mandates. The first section, "Looking In," reviews the U.S. labor movement's traditional domestic focus and the historical absence of a rights-based foundation for American workers' collective action. The second section, "Looking Out," covers a corresponding deficit in labor's international perspective and action. The third section, "Labor Rights Through the Side Door," deals with …
Legal Protection Of Workers’ Human Rights: Regulatory Changes And Challenges In The United States, Lance Compa
Legal Protection Of Workers’ Human Rights: Regulatory Changes And Challenges In The United States, Lance Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] In a 2002 study, the US Government Accountability Office reported that more than 32 million workers in the United States lack protection of the right to organise and to bargain collectively. But since then, the situation has worsened. A series of decisions by the federal authorities under President George Bush has stripped many more workers of organising and bargaining rights. The administration took away bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of employees in the new Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department.18 In the years before the 2009 change of administration, a controlling majority of the five-member National …
Free Trade, Fair Trade, And The Battle For Labor Rights, Lance A. Compa
Free Trade, Fair Trade, And The Battle For Labor Rights, Lance A. Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] Labor rights advocacy is the most direct challenge to the primacy of a marketplace ideology in which efficiency and profit are the highest values. Labor rights advocates promote values of fairness, justice, and solidarity in global commerce. The battle to achieve enforceable hard law that protects workers' rights in the global economy is an important contribution to the labor movement's revitalization. Can a beleaguered movement take on multinational companies and the governments that appease them on these varied international grounds when there is so much still to do on organizing, collective bargaining, and domestic political action? There really is …