Content area
Full Text
KEY WORDS: trade unions, labor organizing, AFL-CIO, employer anti-union offensive, labor movement future
ABSTRACT
For many years, US trade unions declined in union density, organizing capacity, level of strike activity, and political effectiveness. Labor's decline is variously attributed to demographic factors, inaction by unions themselves, the state and legal system, globalization, neoliberalism, and the employer offensive that ended a labor-capital accord. The AFL-CIO New Voice leadership elected in 1995, headed by John Sweeney, seeks to reverse these trends and transform the labor movement. Innovative organizing, emphasizing the use of rank-and-file intensive tactics, substantially increases union success; variants include union building, immigrant organizing, feminist approaches, and industry-wide non-National Labor Relations Board (or nonboard) organizing. The labor movement must also deal with participatory management or employee involvement programs, while experimenting with new forms, including occupational unionism, community organizing, and strengthened alliances with other social movements.
INTRODUCTION
In 1995, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the body that unites most United States unions into a federated organization, experienced its first contested election, in which the insurgent slate won, and the victors, led by John Sweeney as president, announced their intent to transform the labor movement (Sweeney 1996, Welsh 1997). Only rarely does a massive institution directly and publicly confront the spectre of its own demise; even more rarely does a bureaucratic organization, albeit one with social movement origins, attempt rejuvenation through a return to its activist roots. This moment of critique and attempted reconstruction prompts a similar response from social scientists, including sociologists, who have devoted surprisingly little attention to the labor movement.
As a discipline centrally concerned with processes of institutional functioning, social movement activism, and class differentiation and domination, this relative neglect is striking. Even scholars who study class or the labor process tend to neglect the importance of group processes of struggle, "focusing on atomized individual workers as the unit of analysis" (Lembcke et al 1994:117). This emphasis has both impoverished sociology and led labor studies "to recede from the intellectual scene, principally becoming a professional area for training union officials and negotiators" (Lembcke et al 1994:114). But outstanding work of the past ten to fifteen years exemplifies the rewards of a renewed focus on the labor movement; four...