Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Faculty Unions At The Crossroads: Why Playing Defense Is A Losing Strategy, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Buying Time: Gendered Patterns In Union Contracts, Dan Clawson, Jillian Crocker

Dan Clawson

As products of negotiations, union contracts provide insight into areas of stress concerning work hours and schedules. Our analysis demonstrates the ways workers in two occupations—nurses and firefighters—use collective bargaining to develop workplace policies that enable them to manage jobs and family. The contracts show significant differences between firefighters and nurses over issues of work scheduling, overtime, and vacations. These differences reflect nurses’ concern with putting boundaries on their work lives in favor of caregiving and firefighters’ concern with bread winning. Nurse contracts specify scheduling rules in detail, heavily restrict mandatory overtime, and outline guidelines for distributing prime time vacations. …

Labor In Struggle, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Power In Coalition: Strategies For Strong Unions And Social Change, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Restoring The Power Of Unions: It Takes A Movement, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

It’S An Academic Question: Why Progressive Intellectuals Should Not Stay Out Of Internal Union Battles, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Tenure And The Future Of The University, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Response-Tenure, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Class Struggle In Higher Education, Dan Clawson, Marisha Leiblum

Dan Clawson

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This article examines these trends nationally with a focus on one case study, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the state’s public higher education flagship university. First the article examines the concentration of power in fewer hands. Second it looks at the squeeze in the middle, the …

Public Intellectuals: Academics And Movements, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Lessons Of The Civil Rights Movement For A Workers Rights Movement, Aldon Morris, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

In 1955, African Americans in the South faced seemingly impossible conditions, but a decade later, a mass movement had won impressive victories. If workers and unions hope to achieve fundamental changes, not just incremental advances, they should learn from the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement indicates that workers’ rights can be won only if workers launch a mass movement, take risks, engage in direct action, demonstrate an ability to disrupt the normal functioning of society, and maintain that disruption until concessions are won. Political change, legal victories, cultural shifts, and media coverage followed from, and depended on, the …

Lessons Of The Civil Rights Movement For Building A Worker Rights Movement, Aldon Morris, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

In 1955, African Americans in the South faced seemingly impossible conditions, but a decade later, a mass movement had won impressive victories. If workers and unions hope to achieve fundamental changes, not just incremental advances, they should learn from the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement indicates that workers’ rights can be won only if workers launch a mass movement, take risks, engage in direct action, demonstrate an ability to disrupt the normal functioning of society, and maintain that disruption until concessions are won. Political change, legal victories, cultural shifts, and media coverage followed from, and depended on, the …

What Drives A Labor Upsurge?, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

I wrote The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements in hopes of stimulating, and participating in, exactly the kind of discussion presented here. These essays engage issues that will be central to any attempt to revive the labor movement. The contributors are generous about my own work, and at the same time raise challenges and add analyses that address the problems labor faces today. The labor movement will advance more through sharp and vigorous debate than by papering over differences. I’d rather that my bold analysis be proven wrong and contribute to the needed debate than to offer …

Fusion, Democracy, And Politics In Labor’S Next Upsurge, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

The best thing about writing The Next Upsurge has been the discussions and debates it has helped generate, none more stimulating than these essays. I'm delighted that the reviewers are often enthusiastic and always generous. More important, these contributions address the key issues, not just of the book, but facing labor today. I welcome this opportunity to re-state and re-think my positions, in an attempt to do what these essays do so well: move the debate forward.

It was an inspired editorial idea to solicit contributions on the next upsurge as viewed from a European or Canadian perspective. The contributors …

Higher Education And Privatization

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Caring For Our Young: Child Care In Europe And The United States, Dan Clawson, Naomi Gerstel

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.

Unions' Responses To Family Concerns, Naomi Gerstel, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

This article explores the role of unions in regard to work/family issues, a perspective which challenges traditional work/family issues focused primarily on issues like flextime, childcare and family leave. The authors argue for the inclusion of the class component in work and family research studies and stress the importance of researchers to include the responses of unions to family concerns in their investigations. A study of unions, the authors argue, provides access to the experiences of middle-class and working class, a "diverse population not often captured in studies of work-family issues." The authors support their argument by using an analytic …

What Has Happened To The U.S. Labor Movement? Union Decline And Renewal, Dan Clawson, Mary Ann Clawson

Dan Clawson

For many years, US trade unions declined in union density, organizing capacity, level of strike activity, and political effectiveness. Labor’s decline is variously attributed to demographic factors, inaction by unions themselves, the state and legal system, globalization, neoliberalism, and the employer offensive that ended a labor-capital accord. The AFL-CIO New Voice leadership elected in 1995, headed by John Sweeney, seeks to reverse these trends and transform the labor movement. Innovative organizing, emphasizing the use of rank-and-file intensive tactics, substantially increases union success; variants include union building, immigrant organizing, feminist approaches, and industry-wide non-National Labor Relations Board (or nonboard) organizing. The …

Women's Participation In Local Union Leadership: The Massachusetts Experience, Dale Melcher, Jennifer L. Eichstedt, Shelley Eriksen, Dan Clawson

Dan Clawson

A 1989 survey of leaders of a sample of Massachusetts AFL- CIO-affiliated union locals indicates that although women are represented in these union locals' leadership in numbers nearly proportional to the female percentage of membership, they are under-represented in the most influential positions. Women are over-represented as secretaries and seriously under-represented as presidents; they chair many committees, but rarely the key grievance or negotiations committees. Minority women appear to be even more under-represented in leadership positions than are white women. Both male and female union leaders said they would like to see more women in leadership, but most of the …

Interlocks, Pacs, And Corporate Conservatism, Dan Clawson, Alan Neustadtl

Dan Clawson

Two alternative corporate political strategies are identified for Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions to candidates in the 1980 congressional elections: (1) a pragmatic effort to promote a particular company's best interests and (2) an ideological effort to promote conservatism. With the use of multiple regression, this article examines three theoretical explanations of corporate political strategies. The expectations of corporate liberal theory are not confirmed. Rather, there is support for both state structure and interlock theories. It is argued that, at least in 1980, business political behavior was ideologically conservative, which business understood to represent classwide rational interests.

Reagan Or Business? Foundations Of The New Conservatism, Dan Clawson, Mary Ann Clawson

Dan Clawson

No abstract provided.