The Evolution of Strategic and Coordinated Bargaining Campaigns in the 1990s: The Steelworkers’ Experience

With the refocusing of attention of the labor movement on organizing, an increasing number of scholars have been directing their research toward the nature and practice of current union organizing efforts. These scholars have begun updating a literature that had grown sorely out of touch with the organizing experience of America’s unions and have provided the foundation for a more sophisticated understanding of the organizing process. While we applaud this resurgence in organizing research, there has not been a comparable resurgence in research on collective bargaining

The Impact of Employer Opposition on Union Certification Win Rates: A Private/Public Sector Comparison

This report represents the first part of a larger study of public sector organizing that will include a detailed examination of certification, decerticification and multi-union challenge elections

It Takes More Than House Calls: Organizing to Win with a Comprehensive Union-Building Strategy

[Excerpt] Until recently, some national and local union leaders still argued that labor should circle the wagons and take care of existing members rather than spend scarce resources on organizing nonunion workers. Today those voices have largely been silenced by the hard numbers of labor\u27s dramatic decline. As expressed in the platform of the new AFL-CIO leadership slate, the American labor movement must organize at an unprecedented pace and scale. The question unions face today is no longer whether to make organizing a priority but how that can best be achieved

Introduction: Bringing the Study of Work Back to Labor Studies

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Introduction to \u3ci\u3eRavenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor\u3c/i\u3e

[Excerpt] When the Ravenswood Aluminum Company locked out seventeen hundred workers on October 31, 1990, it hardly looked like a big opportunity for labor. In what had become standard operating procedure for employers during the 1980s, management broke off bargaining with the United Steelworkers of America, and then brought hundreds of replacement workers into a heavily fortified plant surrounded by barbed wire and security cameras. Injunctions prevented union members from doing little more than symbolic picketing, and the wheels of justice, as they had done for more than a decade, creaked ever so slowly. All the pieces were in place for another long, drawn-out defeat for labor. … This book chronicles the twenty-month battle between the Steelworkers and the Ravenswood Aluminum Company (RAC). It is the story of an international union already reeling from heavy losses in the steel industry and desperately needing some solid ground. It is the story of a tough and determined union membership, most of whom had spent their entire working lives at the local aluminum plant

Significant Victories: The Practice and Promise of First Contracts in the Public and Private Sectors

After decades of massive employment losses in heavily unionized sectors of the economy, and the exponential growth of the largely unorganized service sector, the American labor movement is struggling to remain relevant. Despite new organizing initiatives, the combination of US labor law and labor relations practices have made new organizing a tremendously arduous endeavor. Private sector workers, in particular, are routinely confronted with a host of aggressive legal, marginally legal, and illegal anti-union tactics from employers and their representatives

Out of the Ashes: The Steelworkers’ Global Campaign at Bridgestone/Firestone

[Excerpt] The purpose of this chapter is to examine how unions and their allies can build global networks in the face of multinational company (MNC) efforts to deny workers their rights to representation and destroy the very unions that represent them. In particular, we examine the strike and the global contract campaign organized by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) against the Japanese-owned Bridgestone/Firestone company

Seeds of Resurgence: The Promise of Organizing in the Public and Private Sectors

[Excerpt] No revival of our American labor movement will be possible without massive new organizing. While it is important to stem the loss of unionized manufacturing jobs and do a better job of servicing and mobilizing current union members, these alone will not put the labor movement on the road to renewal. Even a cursory review of the data shows that new organizing is the cornerstone of labor’s future. We need new members not only to strengthen bargaining power and reinforce our political clout but, as history has shown us, to refocus our vision and purpose. Yet we have been told that this is not possible. The pundits look at our membership figures as clear evidence that workers are no longer interested in organizing and that unions, like the coal-fired furnace and the rotary phone, are relics of an industrial era – no longer relevant in today’s world. We have even let this negativism seep into our own ranks over this last difficult decade. Under the crushing weight of laws that do little to protect workers, rabidly anti-union employers, a burgeoning management consultant industry, and betrayal by our supposed friends in government and academia, we have at times forgotten to believe in ourselves, our vision, and our importance to American workers

Significant Victories: An Analysis of Union First Contracts

[Excerpt] After two decades of massive employment losses in heavily unionized sectors of the economy and exponential growth of the largely unorganized service sector, the U.S. labor movement is struggling to remain relevant. Despite new organizing initiatives and practices, union organizing today remains a tremendously arduous endeavor, particularly in the private sector, as workers and their unions are routinely confronted with an arsenal of aggressive legal and illegal antiunion employer tactics. This vigorous opposition to unions in the private sector does not stop once an election is won, but continues throughout bargaining for an initial union agreement, all too often turning organizing victories into devastating first-contract defeats. Despite these overwhelming obstacles, workers still organize and win—through certification elections and voluntary recognition campaigns in both the private and public sectors. And each year unions successfully negotiate thousands of first contracts in the United States, providing union representation for the first time to hundreds of thousands of new workers. This research takes an in-depth look at what unions achieve in these initial union contracts. Why, when confronted with such powerful opposition, do unorganized workers continue to want to belong to unions and newly organized workers want to stay union? What do these first contracts provide that makes the struggle worthwhile? To explore these questions, we analyze and evaluate union first contracts along four primary dimensions. First, we inventory the basic workers’ rights provided by these contracts, which go beyond the very limited rights provided by federal and state labor law under the “employment at will” system. Second, we evaluate how first contracts provide workers and their unions with the institutional power to shape work and the labor process on a day-to-day basis. Third, we explore how first contracts codify the presence and power of unions in daily work life, and we evaluate which institutional arrangements provide a meaningful role for workers and their unions in their workplaces. Fourth, we examine the kinds of workplace benefits that are codified and supplemented in first contracts, gaining important insights into the types of human resource practices that exist in newly unionized workplaces. Finally, by examining the interactions among these four dimensions, we explore the limitations of what first contracts have been able to achieve in the current organizing environment, and what it would take for unions to improve the quality of first contracts