Blueprint for Change: A National Assessment of Winning Union Organizing Strategies

In the last seven years the AFL-CIO has put forth an immense effort to facilitate, support, and encourage organizing initiatives by all affiliates. Although to date progress has been much slower than the leadership of the labor movement had hoped, more recently there have been some signs that those efforts are beginning to bear fruit. A growing number of unions are putting more resources into organizing, recruiting and training more organizers, running more organizing campaigns, winning more elections and voluntary recognitions, and winning them in larger units. Yet, despite all the new initiatives and resources being devoted to organizing and all the talk of changing to organize, American unions today are at best standing still. Massive employment losses in manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and airline industries have eliminated hundreds of thousands of union jobs, raising the bar even higher for the number of new workers needed to maintain current union density, much less grow. At the same time, the political climate for organizing has become ever more hostile as the threat of terrorism and the fog of war have been used to justify a full scale attack on civil liberties, federal sector unions, immigrant workers, and organizing and collective bargaining rights. Even in this climate, some unions, in some industries, have still managed to make major organizing gains, despite intensive employer opposition. In just the last several years we have witnessed significant victories such as CWA at Cingular Wireless, IFPTE at Boeing, UAW at New York University, PACE at Imerys, SEIU at Catholic Healthcare West, UNITE at Brylane, and HERE in the Las Vegas hotels. Although there was great variation in the industry, workforce, union, and company characteristics in each of these campaigns, still a pattern becomes evident—the unions that are most successful at organizing run fundamentally different campaigns, in both quality and intensity, than those that are less successful. In this paper we focus on these fundamental differences in the nature of winning and losing campaigns which provide us with a blueprint for the kinds of comprehensive organizing strategies that are required to win across a wide range of organizing environments and company and unit characteristics. We also look at the strategic, organizational, and cultural changes the U.S. labor movement must make in order to be able to mount these more comprehensive campaigns and make the gains necessary to significantly increase union density and the political and economic power that goes with it

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

Solution-Phase Assembly of Nanoparticles and Amphiphilic Polymers: Controlling the Morphology From Vesicles to Micelles

Advances in nanocomposite solution-phase assembly involve understanding fundamentally how nanoparticles influence the self-assembly structure of block copolymers. Researchers have shown that self-assembly of amphiphilic block copolymers and nanoparticles offers a powerful route to the formation of multifunctional nanocomposites for medical imaging and drug delivery applications. The possible combinations of various types of nanoparticles and polymers are numerous, but until recently the major factors that control these structures have not been well understood. Work done by others and the work in this thesis have shown that the arrangement of nanoparticles within a polymer matrix affects the composite material\u27s properties in ways not seen in the two separate systems. An important discovery during my thesis work was the formation of polymer vesicles (polymersomes), densely packed with iron oxide nanoparticles in the vesicle walls. I demonstrated that, while well-established self-assembly principles of amphiphilic block copolymers provide a valuable guideline for the preparation of nanoparticle-encapsulating block copolymer assemblies, these principles do not directly apply to the simultaneous self-assembly of nanoparticles and block copolymers. This point is especially important when it is desirable to achieve high density nanoparticle loading and specific arrangement of nanoparticles in polymer assemblies. My work described within this thesis shows how the incorporation of nanoparticles affects the self-assembly structure and how to control the morphology of nanoparticle-encapsulating polymer assemblies

The Establishment and Administration of Pension Plans in the Labor Relations Process

The purpose of this article is to analyze the role of pension plans\u27 in the labor relations process. The earliest pension plans had their origin in the early nineteenth century and were pioneered by fraternal associations established and operated by and for the employees. The advent of unions on the labor scene resulted in the union, instead of the fraternal association, administering the program. As for employer pension plans, the union leaders feared that such programs were only a devious employer\u27s device to prevent unionization. Thus, prior to World War II, employer pension plans were usually unilaterally instituted. However, beginning in 1942 collective bargaining for pension plans began to achieve major momentum. Among the circumstances which combined to produce this result were the tax deduction allowed the employer for contribution to these programs; the National War Labor Board policy of freezing cash pay raises while increasing compensation in the form of fringe benefits; and decisions of the National Labor Relations Board, sustained by the courts, that pensions were properly within the statutory scope of the employer\u27s duty to bargain

Changing to Organize: A National Assessment of Union Organizing Strategies

[Excerpt] In this chapter we seek to answer the following questions: Why has it been so difficult for unions to turn the organizing efforts and initiatives of the last six years into any significant gains in union density? Why have a small number of unions been able to make major gains through organizing? And most importantly, which organizing strategies will be most effective in reversing the tide of the labor movement\u27s organizing decline? What our findings will show is that while the political, legal, and economic climate for organizing continues to deteriorate, and private sector employers continue to mount aggressive opposition to organizing efforts, some unions are winning. Our findings also show that the unions that are most successful at organizing run fundamentally different campaigns, in both quality and intensity, than those that are less successful, and that those differences hold true across a wide range of organizing environments, company characteristics, bargaining unit demographics, and employer campaign variables