The Future Of Union Organizing

This morning we will broadly examine the future of union organizing. It is no secret the number of workers electing to join a union has declined sharply in recent decades. Since 1983, the share of all workers belonging to a union has dropped from roughly 20 percent to less than 12 percent. Today, fewer than 7 percent of private sector workers are union members. There has been an unhappy story, even in this recovery, for the middle class. In the early days of this economic recovery, for every 1 dollar of growth that went to higher wages for America's workers $70 went to corporate profits. The evidence broadly suggests that when people engage in collective bargaining that those results are considerably better. On the average, members of unions earn 27 percent more than those who don't belong to a union for similar work. Members of unions are 28 percent more likely to have health care benefits provided for them at work. They are 64 percent more likely to have a pension plan when they retire. These are the elements of middle class success. AFL–CIO president, Richard Trumka, recently warned the labor movement is in crisis. Gary Chaison, an industrial relations professor at Clark University, told the New York Times unions are thrashing around looking for answers, and there is a sense that this is a make or break time for labor. Either major changes are done, or we will be too late to resuscitate the labor movement.

A study of the long-term decline of the labour movement in America, exploring the outlook for labour and unions in the 21st century. There are insights from contributors from a range of backgrounds - academic and non-academic, domestic and foreign, pro- and anti-union.

The future of union organizing : hearing before the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, first session, hearing held in Washington, DC, September 19, 2013.

This book argues that labor unions have proven to be the only consistently effective mechanism for enabling workers to express their concerns and exert significant influence in the workplace, and documents the extent to which unions have benefited not only members, but the workforce as a whole.

This book studies a «best-practices» example of what is known as the organizing local approach to union renewal. Several unions in the US, the UK, and other countries have embraced this model of unionism as a formula for labor revitalization. Organizing locals aim to strengthen unions by redeploying resources and mobilizing workers around the goal of member recruitment. The union local under study stands out as an exceptional case within the US context. Against the backdrop of a languishing labor movement, this local has succeeded at recruiting workers and keeping its members engaged. The book seeks to unpack this success and examine closely what works, what does not, and how things work. The research design relies on participant observation and in-depth interviews to examine how formal systems of representation and macro-organizing strategies and platforms get translated into micro-level processes, experiences, and relationships. By adopting a micro-social approach, the author reveals what drives union activism in an organizing local, beyond the rhetoric of union officials. Further, the findings identify the conditions for successful union reform, and show formal and informal mechanisms for accommodating opposite orientations in union work, attending to members' expectations of union «help», and changing the status quo through organizing.

In Rebuilding Labor Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization. Throughout this collection, the focus is on the formidable challenges unions face today and on how they may be overcome.-publisher description.

(Black & White version) Fundamentals of Business was created for Virginia Tech's MGT 1104 Foundations of Business through a collaboration between the Pamplin College of Business and Virginia Tech Libraries. This book is freely available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961 It is licensed with a Creative Commons-NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.