Labor Rights in the Era of Union Decline

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-134
Author(s):  
Marc Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Community Coalitions ◽  
Economic Downturns ◽  
Union Decline ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Over Time

The conclusion revisits the main findings of the book and considers how important weaknesses unions exhibited in the 1950s matter now in an era marked by union decline and conservative ascendance. The 1950s conflicts over labor rights were more than an interesting side story. Labor never completely conquered the Midwest, where most union members resided during these years. Many of the vulnerabilities unions exhibited then—weak or nonexistent ties to groups outside of the labor movement, ambivalent political allies, inadequate responses to employer mobilization—were magnified in the coming decades, beginning with the economic downturns in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. Contemporary fights over labor rights bear many of the same features of the 1950s conflicts. While state labor movements generally developed more sophisticated political operations over time, enduring labor–community coalitions have proven elusive and are needed now more than ever.

On the Individual

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Magnusson
Keyword(s):  
School Psychologist ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Developmental Research ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time

A description of two cases from my time as a school psychologist in the middle of the 1950s forms the background to the following question: Has anything important happened since then in psychological research to help us to a better understanding of how and why individuals think, feel, act, and react as they do in real life and how they develop over time? The studies serve as a background for some general propositions about the nature of the phenomena that concerns us in developmental research, for a summary description of the developments in psychological research over the last 40 years as I see them, and for some suggestions about future directions.

Heartland Blues

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Industrial Decline ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Effective Organization ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Activist Groups ◽  
Labor Conflicts ◽  
Death Knell

Heartland Blues provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the 1950s and analyzing campaigns over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. The focus on 1950s labor conflicts, including union failures, departs from popular and academic treatments of the period that emphasize consensus, an accord between capital and labor in collective bargaining, or the conservative drift and bureaucratization of the labor movement. The state campaigns examined in Heartland Blues instead reveal a labor movement often beset by dysfunctional divisions, ambivalent political allies, and substantial employer opposition. Drawing on social movement theories, the book shows how many of the key ingredients necessary for activist groups to succeed, including effective organization and influential political allies, were not a given for labor at its historical peak but instead varied in important ways across the industrial heartland. These limits slowed unions in the 1950s. Not only did labor fail to crack the Sunbelt, it never really conquered the industrial Midwest, where most union members resided in the mid-twentieth century. This diminished union influence within the Democratic Party and in society. The 1950s are far more than an interesting side story. Indeed, the labor movement never solved many of these basic problems. The labor movement’s social and political isolation and its limited responses to employer mobilization became a death knell in the coming decades as unions sought organizational and legislative remedies to industrial decline and the rising anti-union tide.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

Renewed Activism for the Labor Movement: The Urgency of Young Worker Engagement

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maite Tapia ◽  
Lowell Turner
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Development ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Young Workers ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Movement Building

In this article, the authors consider the findings of a multi-year, case study-based research project on young workers and the labor movement in four countries: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The authors examine the conditions under which young workers actively engage in contemporary labor movements. Although the industrial relations context matters, the authors find the most persuasive explanations to be agency-based. Especially important are the relative openness and active encouragement of unions to the leadership development of young workers, and the persistence and creativity of groups of young workers in promoting their own engagement. Embodying labor’s potential for movement building and resistance to authoritarianism and right-wing populism, young workers offer hope for the future if unions can bring them aboard.

scholarly journals Toward a General Theory and Global History of Workers’ Education

2016 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 5-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Merrill ◽  
Susan J. Schurman
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
New Generation

AbstractWorkers’ education, understood to mean the education of workers by workers for purposes they themselves determine, has always been highly contested terrain, just like work itself. If there is to be an adequate global history of workers’ education, it will need to be guided by a suitable general theory. Hegel most expansively and Durkheim most persuasively argued that societies are cognitive and moral projects, of which education is constitutive: knowing and social being are inextricably bound up with one another. In the global democratic revolutions of the last 250 years, the labor movement distinguished itself as simultaneously a social movement, an education in democracy, and a struggle for a democratic education. The history of workers’ education is a history of workers striving to remake their communities into democracies and themselves into democrats. This brief essay introduces a collection of essays representative of a new generation of scholarship on the history of workers’ education, which we hope will help both traditional and emerging labor movements understand their past and think more clearly about their future.

scholarly journals Feminization of Resistance: Reclaiming the Affective and the Indefinite as Counter-Strategy in Academic Labor Activism

Publications ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Aslı Vatansever
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Labor Market Participation ◽  
Decent Work ◽  
New Faculty ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
The Us

‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction of the concept in the context of collective action. It argues that contemporary grassroots academic labor movements rely more explicitly on collective emotions and aim at building long-term bases of solidarity, instead of performative activism and mass mobilizations. This ‘affective turn’ in academic labor activism is argued to signal a “feminization of resistance”, characterized by a pronounced propensity for affective and relational groundwork. This argument is substantiated in view of the Network for Decent Work in Academia (NGAWiss), a nation-wide precarious researchers’ network in Germany, and the New Faculty Majority (NFM), an adjunct advocacy group in the US. The aim is twofold: first, the article contributes to a better understanding of contemporary labor activism by elucidating the precarious collective’s incremental achievements, often ignored by the outcome-oriented labor movement literature. Second, by reframing it as a mode of affective resistance, the article extends the analytical scope of the term “feminization”.

Comparing GAAP With NIPA Earnings

2019 ◽  
pp. 0148558X1987808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilia D. Dichev ◽  
Jingran Zhao
Keyword(s):  
National Income ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ◽  
Economic Downturns ◽  
Accounting Rules ◽  
Corporate Profits ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Significant Factors

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis produces a measure of aggregate corporate profits (national income and product accounts [NIPA] earnings), which is an integral component of the accounting for gross domestic product (GDP). Interesting features of NIPA earnings include consistent accounting rules over time and determination with little or no managerial discretion. Thus, NIPA earnings provide a useful benchmark for generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings, especially in parsing out the effects of real-economy versus the accounting in explaining the documented temporal increase in volatility and decline in persistence of GAAP earnings. We find that GAAP and NIPA earnings are closely related in the early years, with similar means and standard deviations, and with earnings changes correlating at .90 during 1950-1983. This close relation substantially deteriorates, however, during the second half of the sample period, 1984-2016. Although the behavior of NIPA earnings remains roughly the same, the volatility of GAAP earnings increases 10-fold, and the correlation between GAAP and NIPA earnings changes falls to .39. Additional tests reveal that the increase in the volatility of GAAP earnings is mostly due to rapid earnings reversals, especially the effect of large transient items during economic downturns. The frequency and severity of such downturns, however, are roughly the same across the two periods. In addition, there is little change in the properties of aggregate cash flow from operations and revenue over time. Overall, this evidence suggests that in addition to changes in the real economy, changing GAAP rules and their application are significant factors in the changing properties of GAAP earnings.

Polish Immigration and the American Working Class

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Pacyga
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Community ◽  
Rust Belt ◽  
Radical History ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Over Time

In the years after the Civil War, Polish immigrants became an important part of the American working class. They actively participated in the labor movement and played key roles in various industrial strikes ranging from the 1877 Railroad Strike through the rise of the CIO and the post-1945 era of prosperity. Over time, the Polish American working class became acculturated and left its largely immigrant past behind while maintaining itself as an ethnic community. It also witnessed a good deal of upward mobility, especially over several generations. This ethnic community, however, continued to be refreshed with immigrants throughout the 20th century. As with the larger American working class, Polish American workers were hard hit by changes in the industrial structure of the United States. Deindustrialization turned the centers of much of the Polish American community into the Rust Belt. This, despite a radical history, caused many to react by turning toward conservative causes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

BUILDING A GREEN ECONOMY: ADVANCING CLIMATE JUSTICE THROUGH ENVIRONMENTAL-LABOR ALLIANCES*

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-264
Author(s):  
Joanna L. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Green Economy ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Organizational Diversity ◽  
Green Jobs ◽  
Hybrid Identities ◽  
Climate Change Policies

This article explores the role of environmental-labor coalitions in creating opportunities to promote green jobs and to shape climate change policies. The development of a green economy is critical for combating climate change, as well as for addressing rising unemployment and the expansion of precarious work. My research is based on a qualitative study of environmental-labor coalitions in California, United States, and British Columbia, Canada, including fifty-six in-depth digitally recorded interviews with environmental and labor movement leaders and policymakers. The findings point to the importance of three key mechanisms that shape the success of these coalitions: (1) drawing on the strength of organizational diversity, (2) fostering relationships of trust that allow organizations to adopt flexible ideologies, make concessions and tradeoffs, and create hybrid identities, and (3) frame bridging by local social justice organizations to mitigate conflict between environmental and labor movements.

scholarly journals Class Formation and the Labor Movement as the Subject of Dialectic Social History

1993 ◽  
Vol 38 (S1) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Hartmut Zwahr ◽  
Donah Geyer ◽  
Marcel van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The First World War ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
First World

As an introduction to this essay, three points need to be made. First, the European labor movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on which we focus here, were part of bourgeois society. Secondly, they were a factor that challenged bourgeois society and thus contributed in several different ways to its change. Thirdly, as a result of this interaction, the labor movements themselves underwent changes. All of those were lasting changes. The systemic changes, imposed by revolutionary or military force, that accompanied the experiment in socialism, were not. In countries where the labor movement pursued socialist aims prior to the First World War on the crumbling foundations of a primarily pre-bourgeois society, such as in eastern and south-eastern Europe, it was the most radical force behind political democratization and modernization (Russia; Russian Poland: the Kingdom of Poland, Bulgaria). But it could not compensate for the society's evident lack of basic civic development, whereas the socialist experiment in Soviet Russia led not only to the demise of democratization but also to a halt of embourgeoisement.

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