Union Activism and the Baseball Hall of Fame Voting Process: Labor-Management Conflict and Media Bias

Media bias is well documented in the industrial relations domain. This paper extends this research by exploring whether union participation among former professional baseball players affects the likelihood of moving through two stages of the selection process for the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame (HOF), a selection process controlled by sports media. At the HOF ballot inclusion stage, union activism increased position players’ and pitchers’ likelihoods of inclusion, regardless of time period. Conversely, at the HOF voting stage, position players who were union representatives during labor-management conflict (i.e., strikes and lockouts) received significantly less votes than non-activists, while position players who were representatives during labor-management cooperation received significantly more votes. Union activism did not affect pitchers at this stage. We conclude that union activists can be subject to negative media bias during labor-management conflict that, in turn, negatively affects post-employment outcomes.

Trade union community membership: exploring what people who are not in paid employment could contribute to union activism

The industrial relations literature tends to argue that workers join trade unions primarily for instrumental reasons, for example, to obtain assistance if there is a problem at work. But this clearly does not apply to people who are not in work. It is in many ways counterintuitive to join a trade union when one is not an employee or in paid employment, looking for a job, or retired. Generally, there is little material benefit in doing so. Others have noted, however, that personal values, particularly associated with the ideological left, can cultivate a predisposition toward joining a union that is not based on a purely material calculus. Nevertheless, this analysis is usually applied to workers. The research reflected in this article aims to understand the motivation of people who are not in paid employment, such as jobseekers/unemployed, students and retirees, to join labour unions and become active within them. It does so through a case study of the United Kingdom’s largest private sector union, Unite, and considers the contribution to, or rationale for, union activism within community membership and the possibilities for rethinking trade unionism beyond its traditional workplace base.

Civil Society in Hybrid Regimes: Trade Union Activism in Post-2003 Iraq

This article explores the relationship between hybrid regimes and civil society. It examines the extant debate between ‘neo-Tocquevilleans’ and their opponents over whether or not a robust civil society portends democratic transition and consolidation. It demonstrates the limits of these two models by arguing that civil society in hybrid regimes can in fact agitate against the state, advocate for democratic freedoms and achieve significant political reforms even when these do not lead to broader democratization. To demonstrate, this article documents the case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions through 15 years of complex Iraqi politics, from the 2003 US-led intervention and during the incumbency of Prime Minister’s Maliki (2006–2014) and Abadi (2014–2018). By analysing primary materials produced by and about the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, it finds that this case holds important lessons for those seeking to understand the complex interface between civil society and the state in hybrid regimes.

Researching around our subjects

This article explores the opportunities and obstacles of researching women’s trade union activism in the British film and television industries between 1933 and 2017. The surviving material on women’s union participation is incomplete and fragmented, and so my research has combined an examination of archival material—the union’s journal and the meeting minutes, correspondence and ephemera of three iterations of its equality committee—with new and existing oral history interviews. Sherry J. Katz has termed this methodological approach “researching around our subjects”, which involves “working outward in concentric circles of related sources” to reconstruct women’s experiences (90). While “researching around my subjects” was a challenging and time-consuming process, it was also a rewarding one, producing important insights into union activism as it relates to gender and breaking new ground in both women’s labour and women’s film and television history. This article concludes with a case study on the appointment of Sarah Benton as researcher for the ACTT’s Patterns report in 1973, revealing the benefits of this methodological approach in reconstructing events which have been effectively erased from the official record.