Engineering Commons^™

Why American Engineers Aren't Unionized - A Comparative Perspective, Peter F. Meiksins, Chris Smith

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

This article presents a comparative perspective on why U.S. engineers are not unionized. The decline of organized labor in the U.S. has stimulated a new interest in comparative research. Explanations of the prolonged stagnation and contraction of the U.S. labor movement that focus on the U.S. alone run the risk of assuming that the U.S. case is normal, and that the decline of organized labor is a structural inevitability of advanced capitalism. By broadening their scope to include other industrialized countries with similar political economies and different labor histories, students of the labor movement will be better able to identify …