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Full-Text Articles in Labor Relations
What Is Labor’S True Purpose? The Implications Of Seiu’S Unite To Win Proposals For Organizing, Kate Bronfenbrenner
What Is Labor’S True Purpose? The Implications Of Seiu’S Unite To Win Proposals For Organizing, Kate Bronfenbrenner
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] That labor is in a crisis cannot be questioned. While there may be some labor leaders who are content to keep ministering to an ever less powerful, shrinking base, there were few in the room that day that would disagree with the words expressed by SEIU International Executive Vice President Gerry Hudson on the opening panel, that the U.S. "labor movement is becoming dangerously close to being too small to matter." For the first time in decades, both organizing activity and union membership numbers have dropped precipitously. Where in past years unions had to organize 500,000 new workers just …
Significant Victories: An Analysis Of Union First Contracts, Tom Juravich, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Robert Hickey
Significant Victories: An Analysis Of Union First Contracts, Tom Juravich, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Robert Hickey
Kate Bronfenbrenner
[Excerpt] After two decades of massive employment losses in heavily unionized sectors of the economy and exponential growth of the largely unorganized service sector, the U.S. labor movement is struggling to remain relevant. Despite new organizing initiatives and practices, union organizing today remains a tremendously arduous endeavor, particularly in the private sector, as workers and their unions are routinely confronted with an arsenal of aggressive legal and illegal antiunion employer tactics. This vigorous opposition to unions in the private sector does not stop once an election is won, but continues throughout bargaining for an initial union agreement, all too often …
Fanning The Flames (After Lighting The Spark): Multi-Trade Comet Programs, Jeffrey Grabelsky, Adam Pagnucco, Steve Rockafellow
Fanning The Flames (After Lighting The Spark): Multi-Trade Comet Programs, Jeffrey Grabelsky, Adam Pagnucco, Steve Rockafellow
Jeffrey Grabelsky
[Excerpt] The COMET (Construction Organizing Membership Education Training) is an educational program utilized by building trades unions to generate rank and file support for organizing new members. Since 1996, the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO has been sponsoring COMET training in multi-trade settings for its fifteen affiliates. Between 1997 and 1998, the Department undertook a systematic evaluation of its multi-trade COMET programs to determine their impact on attitudes toward organizing as well as on the nature and extent of organizing activities. This article summarizes the lessons the Department learned. Among other conclusions, the evaluation reaffirmed that COMET …
Serving The Public Interest: Preventing Double-Breasting In The Construction Industry, Jeffrey Grabelsky
Serving The Public Interest: Preventing Double-Breasting In The Construction Industry, Jeffrey Grabelsky
Jeffrey Grabelsky
Excerpt] But the immediate question I am addressing is how the practice of double-breasting undermines the stability of collective bargaining in the construction industry. The simple answer is that it is not exceedingly difficult for a unionized contractor to operate a double-breasted nonunion firm and, given the increasingly intense competitive pressures to cut labor costs (given rising land and material costs), employers have a strong incentive to double-breast. To the extent unionized contractors have pursued that business strategy, how has it impacted the system of collective bargaining in the construction industry?
Ensuring A Decent Global Workplace: Labor Rights Belong In Trade Agreements, Lance A. Compa
Ensuring A Decent Global Workplace: Labor Rights Belong In Trade Agreements, Lance A. Compa
Lance A Compa
[Excerpt] Linking workers' rights to international trade is an idea whose time has come and stayed, despite the best efforts of free trade ideologues to chase it away. In looming congressional debates about "fast track" negotiating authority, the Bush administration and Congress confront powerful demands from workers, trade unionists and a wider public for rules protecting human rights and labor rights, not just corporate investments, in trade agreements.
Letter To The Editor, New Labor Forum, Jeffrey Grabelsky
Letter To The Editor, New Labor Forum, Jeffrey Grabelsky
Jeffrey Grabelsky
[Excerpt] Bill Fletcher and Rick Hurd have shined a critical light on a vital issue facing the labor movement. They have asked, but not yet answered, how the AFL-ClO's "Organizing for Change, Changing to Organize" program will help us build vibrant and democratic unions committed to inclusion and ready to grapple with the tough issues of race and gender. If their essay provides an excuse for some unions to avoid the challenge of organizing while debating these issues, it would be most unfortunate. But if their piece provokes a more serious and candid dialogue about external organizing and internal transformation, …