Labor Relations Commons^™

Advantages Of Backwardness: Lessons For Social Europe From The American Labour Movement, Lowell Turner

Lowell Turner

[Excerpt] In the crisis of declining union influence, the United States has played a vanguard role. The weakness of labour in the U.S. has opened the door to the neoliberal policies developed here and then imposed on the global economy. More recent efforts to revitalise the labour movement aim, among other things, to reverse such policies. In suffering union decline and grappling for new strategies, we have what Alexander Gerschenkron once called the ‘advantages of backwardness’. Ironically, European unions and social democrats can perhaps derive lessons not only from our failures but also from our efforts to turn the tide.

Perils Of The High And Low Roads: Employment Relations In The United States And Germany, Lowell Turner, Kirsten S. Wever, Michael Fichter

Lowell Turner

[Excerpt] The U.S. crisis is characterized by growing income inequality, a shrinking safety net, and the decline of worker representation. Like the German crisis, it is caused in part by intensified global competition. Unlike in Germany, problems in the United States have also been exacerbated by deregulation, short-term horizons (e.g., quarterly reports to shareholders), and the decline of the labor movement.

Both Germany and the United States, however, have substantial political, economic, and social resources to use in solving their problems. The contemporary crises do not appear for either of these countries to foreshadow a major collapse like that of …

The Power Of Questions, Ken Margolies

Ken Margolies

[Excerpt] “When you are tempted to make a statement, ask a question instead.” That valuable advice came from Fred Ross, Sr., the veteran organizer who was a mentor to the legendary Cesar Chavez, a founder of the United Farm Workers union. Ross was teaching the power of questions to provoke people to action, gather needed information, share knowledge, and focus their attention. Stewards would be wise to include this tactic in the chest of tools they use when advocating for their co-workers.

Managing Union Management, Ken Margolies

Ken Margolies

[Excerpt] Management is a function, as well as a class of people. In this article, network member Ken Margolies discusses the management function within unions. It’s a subject he knows pretty well, having written a thesis about it. However, despite some great work by Ken and others, we are still a long way from a union theory of management. We know that command-and-control leads to endless problems, but we are still scratching our heads over what to do instead. Perhaps one place we could start is within our own organisations – labor unions. It seems unlikely that we can meet …

Compensating Wage Differentials For Mandatory Overtime, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Paul L. Schumann

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Our paper estimates the extent to which employees are compensated for an unfavorable job characteristic, being required to accept mandatory assignment of overtime, by receiving higher straight—time wages. Our estimating equations are derived from a model in which wage rates and the existence of mandatory assignment of overtime are jointly determined in the market by the interaction of employee and employer preferences. While on average, we do not observe the existence of a compensating wage differential for mandatory overtime, we do observe the existence of such differentials for unionized workers and workers with only a few years experience at a …

The Effect Of Unions On Productivity In The Public Sector: The Case Of Municipal Libraries, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Joshua L. Schwarz

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] This paper represents our initial efforts at analyzing the effects of unions on productivity in the public sector. We first sketch an analytical framework that can be used to estimate these effects, focusing for expository purposes on municipal public libraries. We initially focus on libraries because considerable effort has been devoted to conceptualizing productivity measures for them and because of the availability of data to implement the framework. After discussing the analytical framework, we present preliminary estimtes of the effects of unions on productivity in public libraries based upon analyses of data from 71 municipal libraries in Massachusetts. We …

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 …

Cost-Of-Living Adjustment Clauses In Union Contracts: A Summary Of Results, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Leif Danziger, Gee San

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Our paper provides an explanation why cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) provisions and their characteristics vary widely across U.S. industries. We develop models of optimal risk sharing between a firm and union to investigate the determinants of a number of contract characteristics. These include the presence and degree of wage indexing, the magnitude of deferred noncontingent wage increases, contract duration, and the trade-off between temporary layoffs and wage indexing. Preliminary empirical tests of some of the implications of the model are described. One key finding is that the level of unemployment insurance benefits appears to influence the level of layoffs and the …

Officer Performance And Compensation In Local Building Trades Unions, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] This paper presents estimates of the relationship between the performance and compensation of local building trades union leaders. A growing literature has revived the common-sense notion that organizations should structure the compensation of both their employees and their executives so as to encourage them to take actions consistent with the goals of the organizations. One way to minimize the probability that executives will take actions contrary to the organization's goals is to tie their compensation to measures of their organization's performance.

Municipal Government Structure, Unionization, And The Wages Of Fire Fighters, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Also important to any analysis of labor costs in the public sector today is, of course, the effect of collective bargaining on wages. For reasons described in a recent article by Orley Ashenfelter, fire fighters provide an excellent test of union wage effects at the city level. This study will therefore use fire fighters as an example with which to assess and compare the effects on wages of both unionism and the structure of municipal government. This article is in many respects an extension of the excellent study by Asehenfelter, who examined the effect of the International Association of …

Unions And Productivity In The Public Sector: A Study Of Municipal Libraries, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Daniel R. Sherman, Joshua L. Schwarz

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This paper develops and illustrates the use of two methodologies to analyze the effect of unions on productivity in the public sector. Although the methodologies are applicable to a wide variety of public sector functions, the focus of the paper is on municipal libraries because of the availability of relevant data. The empirical analysis, which uses 1977 cross-section data on 260 libraries, suggests that collective bargaining coverage has not significantly affected productivity in municipal libraries.

Workers, Racism And History: A Response, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] This intimate dependence of white egalitarianism upon black exclusion forms the central theme of Herbert Hill's essay. Arguing that this condition is neither episodic nor solely of historical interest, Hill asserts that these racist attitudes (and the action that flowed from them) were systemic across two centuries of working class development and actually provide the central continuous rational for understanding institutional trade union activity from the early nineteenth century into the present. America's labor unions. Hill writes, are "the institutional expression of white working class racism, and of policies and practices that resulted in unequal access, dependent on race, …

Teamster Democracy: A Moment Of Possibility, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] The association between the union and the underworld, a relationship that young Walter Lippmann simply could not envision, did not stem from an insidious criminal power that somehow proved impervious to FBI surveillance. Rather, criminal involvement in the trucking industry may actually be the most lasting contribution to modern America made by those who, in the name of fundamentalism, prohibition and creationism, fought that modernity so insistently. During prohibition, organized crime's interest in the trucking industry grew exponentially as urban criminal groups developed enormous fleets of trucks to transport illegal liquor. Following repeal in 1933, the industry remained attractive …

[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

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 The Cio, 1935-1955], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Labor's upsurge in the 1930s remains for many even in our own time a source of inspiration and uplift. Those who are romantically inclined have long cherished the image of union militancy that attaches to that decade, a militancy that many have longed to see revived in recent years. Some contemporary union activists and their supporters, with more than a touch of a similar romanticism, frequently promote the claim that as the anti-union 1920s preceded the 1930s militancy, so too would the anti-union Reagan years give way to rekindled worker activism. Scholars as well have been influenced by this …

[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

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 Frederick W. Taylor And The Rise Of Scientific Management], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Daniel Nelson has written an informative book that helps to explain important aspects of Taylor's life. But the analysis of the man, his influence, and the opposition both engendered is too narrowly cast to serve as a final rebuttal to Taylor's critics. By 1923, Nelson writes toward the end of his book, Taylor's reputation was secure and worker opposition to his approach was low: "The unionists had mellowed," Nelson comments. Yet the reader is never informed that this "mellowing" occurred in the midst of the most severe and pervasive anti-union campaign to that date in American history. This omission …

[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.

American Labor History, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

To account for the persistent struggles of a working people that only episodically (and even then with hut a small minority) sought to transform democratic capitalism, and to do so without exaggerating the reality of employer or governmental opposition, will not produce an heroic synthesis of this country's history, to be sure. But it could abet an even more serious appreciation of the highly complex social and political lives Americas working men and women.

Response To Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness And The American Labor Movement, 1790-1920", Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Wilentz's critique of the exceptionalist theme in American historiography is to the point. Whether one applauded the absence of feudalism, and therefore class conflict, in America with the historians of the 1950s or bemoaned that liberal democratic tradition as the "nail in the coffin of class consciousness" in the 1970s, either interpretative structure sacrifices empirical evidence for grand theory. In the former, the careers of Thomas Skidmore or Ira Stewart are all but incomprehensible; in the latter, men like Joseph R. Buchanan or Eugene V. Debs have little relevance. More importantly, the actual experience of the majority of American …

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 …

Gerechtigkeit Ohne Gewerkschaft Und Betriebsrat? Konfliktschlichtung In Gewerkschaftsfreien Betrieben In Den Usa, Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

Zu den Faktoren, die in jüngster Zeit in mehreren Ländern – insbesondere in den USA – zu einem Rückgang der Mitgliederzahlen der Gewerkschaften geführt haben, zählen Strategien des Human Resource Managements wie „nonunion arbitration“ (gewerkschaftsfreies Schiedsverfahren“. Arbeitgeber in nicht tarif- und gewerkschaftsgebundenen Betrieben führen solche „neuen Verfahren der Konfliktschlichtung“ (NVK) mit dem Ziel ein, einen Teilersatz für die gewerkschaftliche Interessenvertretung zu gewähren. Sie stellen eine besondere Herausforderung für die Gewerkschaften dar und machen die Anpassung ihrer Interessenvertretungsstrategien erforderlich. Zwei alternative Handlungsmöglichkeiten bieten sich an. Eine Möglichkeit besteht darin , solche NVK einfach mit dem Argument abzulehnen, dass es sich um …

[Review Of The Book The Evolution Of The Modern Workplace], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] Taken as a whole, The Evolution of the Modern Workplace can be seen as fulfilling two different, but equally important roles. The first is as a compendium of information and data on key aspects of workplace employment relations. One could imagine it serving as an excellent assigned reading for a graduate seminar on British employment relations as well as a useful reference guide and handbook for researchers in this area. At the same time, the contributions to the volume also combine to provide a picture of employment relations system change that should shape thinking in this field and inspire …

Das Amerikanische Arbeitsrecht Aus Der Perspektive Historischer Und Zukünftiger Entwicklungen, Alexander Colvin, Katherine V. W. Stone

Alexander Colvin

In den vergangenen 15 Jahren ließen sich im amerikanischen Kollektiv- und Individualarbeitsrecht sowohl eine Fortsetzung der früheren Trends als auch die Entstehung neuer Themenfelder beobachten.Das System des kollektiven Arbeitsrechts, das die gewerkschaftliche Interessenvertretung und die Beziehungen zwischen den Beschäftigten und dem Management regelt, hat sich in seiner grundlegenden, auf die Zeit der Great Depression und die Jahre unmittelbar nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zurückgehenden Rechtsstruktur kaum verändert. Das amerikanische Individualarbeitsrecht hat dagegen mit der Einführung zusätzlicher individueller Arbeitnehmerrechte eine beträchtliche Dynamik entwickelt. Die Veränderungen in der Arbeitsorganisation und die Entwicklung neuer Formen von Arbeitsverträgen bedeuten eine zusätzliche Herausforderung für die traditionelle …

Improved Metrics For Workplace Dispute Resolution Procedures: Efficiency, Equity, And Voice, John W. Budd, Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

Many debates surround systems for resolving workplace disputes. In the United States, traditional unionized grievance procedures, emerging nonunion dispute resolution systems, and the court-based system for resolving employment law disputes have all been criticized. What is missing from these debates are rich metrics beyond speed and satisfaction for comparing and evaluating dispute resolutions systems. In this paper, we develop efficiency, equity, and voice as these standards. Unionized, nonunion, and employment law procedures are then qualitatively evaluated against these three metrics.

[Review Of The Book Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism And The Public Workplace], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] In this splendid book, Paul Johnston applies his broad understanding of contemporary social theory to an analysis of a series of carefully matched field research cases to achieve genuine theoretical insights. His analysis addresses such fundamental issues as the nature of public sector unionism—its goals and the weapons it uses to achieve them, the ways it differs from private sector unionism—and the dynamics of social movement unionism. This work is an important contribution to the resurgent body of inductive theory development in industrial relations research that has emerged in recent years.

[Review Of The Book Unions And Workplace Change In Canada], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] Some leading unions in Canada are notable for the diversity of their responses to workplace change. These unions' policies and strategies, which range from the Steelworkers' (USWA) bold experiment in employee ownership and co-determination at Algoma Steel to the Autoworkers' (CAW) activist response to the pressures of the Japanese production and management systems at the CAMI auto plant, have produced significant variation in change processes and outcomes. This range of activity by Canadian unions in response to workplace change provides a fertile area for study by industrial relations researchers, as well as important challenges for policy makers and practitioners …

[Review Of The Book What Do Unions Do? A Twenty-Year Perspective], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] The 1984 publication of Richard Freeman and James Medoff’s What Do Unions Do? was a landmark event in research on labor unions. It challenged existing negative economic conceptions of the role of unions by presenting a two-faced model of unionism in which the negative monopoly face of unions was counter-balanced by a positive collective voice face. For those in the labor movement, this book became a powerful source of academic support for their value to society and the economy. Among academics, WDUD was equally influential, as it encouraged a renewed, more data-intensive and methodologically sophisticated approach to research on …