Alt-Bargaining

Reflections on the modern labor movement tend to take a bad-news/good-news approach to the future: yes, unions are down, but a new trend suggests they are far from out. The framing is optimistic, but also right. What’s “new” has often involved innovations in unionizing, and over the past three decades organized labor has gotten creative, taken risks, and every once in a while—for the first time in a while—started winning. The new wave campaigns were variously “comprehensive,” legally canny, sometimes global, and usually movement-esque in their approach to traditionally underrepresented constituencies and sectors. Less discussed is that the trends developed counterparts: hot takes in unionization became new normals in negotiation. If exposing dirty directors weakened corporate resolve in union drives, C-suite exposés became a regular feature in contract drives. If union organizers learned that an employer’s fiercest anti-union weapons could be traded away during a campaign, contract organizers realized that a collective bargaining agreement could do the same for future campaigns. And if fighting for a union became less about money and more about morality, so did fighting for a contract. The current trend is “alt,” short for “alternative-labor,” and invoked where unions or non-profits mobilize workers for better working conditions but not necessarily collective bargaining. As its name implies, the efforts have varied origins, tactics, and aims, making the category hard to define with specificity. But if the alt-labor innovations of today signal how more mature entities—alt-, traditional, or otherwise—will push for workplace benefits tomorrow, clarifying what the present advance is, exactly, is useful foreshadowing. That definitional project is one goal of this article. Alt-labor is incredibly diverse, but through-lines exist. Its constituent groups are repeatedly marked by three non-standard relationships to law that generate exceptional conceptions of group membership, challenge organizing’s presumptive outer-bounds, and prove how even bad organizing doctrine can be harnessed for good. The major goal, though, is to argue that alt-labor isn’t foreshadowing anything because alt-bargaining is here. Over and over, the unconventional legal orientations that facilitate alt-labor’s inclusive approaches to membership, fluid conceptions of which workers or what entities are organizable, and optimistic spins on employment rights can be spotted in recent campaigns where the activists are already assembled and scrutiny instead surrounds how the group is negotiating. The innovative legal perspectives that make up alternative organizing practices, in other words, can now be found in situations where labor and management are actually passing proposals

The Right to Improvise in Low Wage Work

The resurgence of strikes in the non-union fast food and retail sectors has created unprecedented momentum for increases in state, local, and company-specific minimum wages. The once fantastical demand for a $15 an hour wage floor has been legislated into life in two states, four major cities, and counting. Early work, drawing from organizational studies, identified “improvisation” as the theoretical engine of the walkouts, and while that strategy remains, the ground has since shifted. Today’s strikes are no longer just about McDonald’s or Walmart but low wage jobs generally, from child care, to adjunct teaching, to security, and beyond. The article tracks this ambitious next step and asks the critical question of whether improvised resistance can play a truly foundational and widespread role in workplace advocacy. The answer is “yes” — but only if the law lets it. Workers improvise when they trust each other, and they trust each other when they can talk to each other in relaxed settings. At work, and under longstanding labor law, that means break time. But work changed and the law did not. Today’s low wage service economy is nothing like the post-War industrial age when the main law governing workplace relationships was established. A prime consequence is the end of opportunities to informally hang out on the job — that means less talk, less trust, and a much diminished potential that improvisation will arise organically. This article argues that protecting the right to improvise in low wage work requires reform of the labor law super-principle that “working time is for work” and nothing else. In 2016 working time is often the only time, so workers must be empowered to interact freely right there and then. Two specific changes are proposed. First, workers should be allowed to chit-chat — about any topic — in the midst of assigned tasks. While allowing talking while working might seem like a productivity menace, multitasking research suggests the opposite. Second, labor law should carve out space for workers to take “micro-breaks,” short concerted worktime stoppages that impact production only modestly. Both changes are possible through existing precedent and without amendment to the National Labor Relations Act

Improvisational Unionism

Recent fights for a $15-an-hour minimum wage at Walmart and in the fast-food industry have interested academics, captivated the press, and energized the public. For good reason. The campaigns upend conventional wisdom about what unions do (help workers win collective bargaining rights) and why they do it (build the membership). Scattered flash strikes for seemingly impossible or idiosyncratic goals on no obvious timeline have shattered that mold. Though much has already been said about these developments, scholarship has yet to provide a rigorous theoretical frame to categorize and explain the new form of activism. This Article argues that improvisation — long the engine of comedy and jazz but more recently a topic of serious academic inquiry — does both. Improvisational unionism is an intentional social practice that galvanizes courageous conduct, inspires new relationships, and, most importantly, spreads. It also functions as a legal strategy selected for its unique potential to unlock worker militancy amid law and institutional restrictions that have corroded labor’s power for decades

Power and Pay Secrecy

The legal momentum toward pay transparency is widespread and fast-moving. Since 2010, over a dozen states have passed laws prohibiting employers from telling workers they may not talk about wages. Proponents see these and related transparency laws as crucial steps to combat sex- and race-based pay discrimination in the workplace. But do state anti-secrecy laws actually reduce pay secrecy in the first place? That basic question remains largely unexplored. This Article fills the gap through a unique national survey that includes information about pay discussion rules and a range of other relevant employer and employee characteristics across the fifty states. We find that just under half of all workers in states that have prohibited pay secrecy rules still confront one at work. Surprisingly, this is only slightly less than the fraction of workers who are subject to pay secrecy rules in states without a law against them. Moreover, employers seem to react to state laws not by removing the expectation that workers should remain silent but by making their pay secrecy rules more informal—though no less illegal. Our analyses also show that state variations in the types and severities of employer penalties for violating the law have little overall impact on the prevalence or formality of pay secrecy rules, with the notable exception of California and its especially comprehensive remedies. But even in California, four in ten workers remain subject to an illegal pay secrecy policy. Though employment law enforcement is notoriously poor, pay secrecy rules seem uniquely durable—and state pay secrecy bans uniquely futile. In considering why, we document the old and new arguments used to understand secrecy’s persistence. But even in combination these factors are not adequately explanatory. We contend instead that the dominant driver is employer power, in two forms. The first, coercive power, is widely documented and understood. The second, known as legitimating power, is not. We find strong evidence for this latter form and suggest it is the key to explaining the pervasiveness of illegal pay secrecy rules. The insight helps critique the newest efforts to legislate transparency, like mandated pay ranges in job postings. Most importantly, a legitimate power lens clarifies the best paths toward nationwide pay transparency in the future

Book Reviews

Wesleyan Perspectives on the New Creation M. Douglas Meeks, ed. Nashville: Kingswood, 2004, 200 pp., paper, 2004, $30.00 Reviewed by William J Abraham Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places Eugene H. Peterson Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2005, xii, 368pp. cloth,$25.00 Reviewed by Elaine A. Heath The Evangelical Moment: The Promise of an American Religion By Kenneth J. Collins Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press 2005, 288 pp., paper, 22.99 Reviewed by Nathan Crawford Theology as History and Hermeneutics: A Post-Critical Evangelical Conversation with Contemporary Theology Laurence W. Wood Lexington: Emeth Publisher 2004, 261 pp. Reviewed by Nathan Crawford Resistance and Theological Ethics Ronald H. Stone and Robert L. Stivers, eds. Lanham, Maryland: Roman & Littlefield Publishers 2004, ri, 334 pp. paper, 28.95 Reviewed by Joerg Rieger The Ripple Church: Multiply Your Ministry by Parenting New Churches Phil Stevenson Indianapolis, IN: Wesleyan Publishing House 2004. pp. 186, $12.99. Reviewed by J.D. Payne The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture Brevard S. Childs Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2004, xii, 332 pp. caseboulld,$35.00 Reviewed by John N. Oswalt God is Not Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist D. Brent Laytham, ed. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Press. 2004, 152 pp., paper, $15.99 Reviewed by Michael Rynkiwitch A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics David Jasper Louisville, KY: Westmilnster John Knox Press 2004, xii, 148 pp. paper,$19.95 Reviewed by Charles M. Woo

Cosmology at the Millennium

One hundred years ago we did not know how stars generate energy, the age of the Universe was thought to be only millions of years, and our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy known. Today, we know that we live in an evolving and expanding Universe comprising billions of galaxies, all held together by dark matter. With the hot big-bang model, we can trace the evolution of the Universe from the hot soup of quarks and leptons that existed a fraction of a second after the beginning to the formation of galaxies a few billion years later, and finally to the Universe we see today 13 billion years after the big bang, with its clusters of galaxies, superclusters, voids, and great walls. The attractive force of gravity acting on tiny primeval inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter gave rise to all the structure seen today. A paradigm based upon deep connections between cosmology and elementary particle physics -- inflation + cold dark matter -- holds the promise of extending our understanding to an even more fundamental level and much earlier times, as well as shedding light on the unification of the forces and particles of nature. As we enter the 21st century, a flood of observations is testing this paradigm.Comment: 44 pages LaTeX with 14 eps figures. To be published in the Centennial Volume of Reviews of Modern Physic