Bruce Nissen

Unions as Social Capital: Renewal through a Return to the Logic of Mutual Aid?

This paper argues that unions can increase both the normative and instrumental value of trade unionism if they organize their activities and functions around regulating and extending the natu rally occurring social networks that tie members together in work- places. In so doing, the paper analyzes how the service model of unionism has contributed to shop-floor weakness, identifies the basic logic and limitations of the organizing model, and details the practices and structures that would be integral to organizing unions around social-capital formation and mutual-aid functions.

Working in restructured workplaces : challenges and new directions for the sociology of work

Preface Working in Restructured Workplaces: An Introduction - D.B. Cornfield, et al PART I. RECONFIGURING WORKPLACES STATUS HIERARCHIES 1. Teamwork vs. Tempwork: Managers and the Dualisms of Workplace Restructuring - V. Smith 2. Flexible Production, Rigid Jobs: Lessons From the Clothing Industry - I.M. Taplin 3. The Technological Foundations of Task-Coordinating Structures in New Work Organizations: Theoretical Notes From the Case of Abdominal Surgery - J.R. Zetka, Jr. 4. A Tale of Two Career Paths: The Process of Status Acquisition by a New Organizational Unit - E.K. Briody, et al 5. Learning Factories or Reproduction Factories? Labor-Management Relations in the Japanese Consumer Electronics Maquiladoras in Mexico - M. Kenney, et al 6. The Impact of Comparable Worth on Earnings Inequality - D.M. Figart PART II. CASUALIZATION OF EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS 7. Two Paths to Self-Employment? Womens and Mens Self-Employment in the United States, 1980 - D. Carr 8. Getting Away and Getting By: The Experiences of Self-Employed Homeworkers - N.C. Jurik 9. How Permanent Was Permanent Employment? Patterns of Organizational Mobility in Japan, 1916-1975 - M.M. Cheng & A.L. Kalleberg 10. The Transformation of the Japanese Employment System: Nature, Depth, and Origins - J.R. Lincoln & Y. Nakata PART III. RESTRUCTURING AND WORKER MARGINALIZATION 11. Taking It or Leaving It: Instability and Turnover in a High-Tech Firm - K. Schellenberg 12. Just a Temp: Experience and Structure of Alienation in Temporary Clerical Employment - J.K. Rogers 13. Womens Work, Mens Work, and the Sense of Control - C.E. Ross & M.P. Wright 14. Group Relations at Work: Solidarity, Conflict, and Relations With Management - R. Hodson 15. Effects of Organizational Innovations in AIDS Care on Burnout Among Urban Hospital Nurses - L.H. Aiken & D.M. Sloane 16. Adapting, Resisting, and Negotiating: How Physicians Cope With Organizational and Economic Change - T.J. Hoff & D.P. McCaffrey 17. Reemployment in the Restructured Economy: Surviing Change, Displacement, and the Gales of Creative Destruction - B.A. Rubin & B.T. Smith PART IV. COMPARATIVE LABOR RESPONSES TO GLOBAL RESTRUCTURING 18. To Cut or Not to Cut: A Cross-National Comparison of Attitudes Toward Wage Flexibility - A. van den Berg, et al 19. Globalization and International Labor Organizing: A World-System Perspective - T. Boswell & D. Stevis 20. Trade Unions and European Integation - R. Hyman 21. The Impact of the Movement Toward Hemispheric Free Trade on Industrial Relations - R.J. Adams 22. Labor and Post-Fordist Industrial Restructuring in East and Southeast Asia - F.C. Deyo CONCLUSION 23. The Changing Sociology of Work and the Reshaping of Careers - P.M. Hirsch & C.E. Naquin 24. The Advent of the Flexible Workplace: Implications for Theory and Research - A.L. Kalleberg 25. Index About the Contributors

Political Activism as Part of a Broader Civic Engagement The Case of SEIU Florida Healthcare Union

This article examines the impact of a Florida health care union’s political activities on broader member “civic engagement.” Its grassroots political approach (membership education, leadership development, mobilizational structures, and capacity) and a broad “public interest” framing of goals has stimulated new forms of civic engagement by its volunteer leaders and members. Alternative explanations of its success in terms of membership demographics and method of conducting political activities is conducted, with the latter providing most of the explanation. This approach to politics is commended to the labor movement at large, both for its effectiveness and its legitimizing role in U.S. public opinion.

Immigrant Construction Workers and Health and Safety: The South Florida Experience

Immigrants are a growing percentage of the U.S. construction labor force, so the safety of their working conditions deserves study. This article reports on research surveying 283 immigrant construction workers in south Florida about their safety training, use of personal protective equipment, and employer safety practices. Potential impacts of unionized status and documented legal status are tested through regression analysis. Results show only a minor positive relationship of unionization with more training and safer conditions and essentially no relationship between documented legal status and training or safe conditions. Reasons for the weak results are discussed, and further research questions are posed.

The Legacy of Racism A Case Study of Continuing Racial Impediments to Union Effectiveness

The authors examine the past and present racial dynamics in a Florida public sector union, with special emphasis on a union local led by one of the authors. Past white racial exclusionism and struggle have created a “fortress mentality” among some of the unions African American leadership and membership that focuses on racial control rather than organizing and growth. This is more pronounced in an older generation that lived through earlier struggles against white discrimination. Using writings by Robin D. G. Kelley, Manning Marable, and Bill Fletcher, the authors draw general conclusions on what types of practice are most likely to counter racial impediments to union effectiveness.

Local Union Relations with Immigrants: the Case of South Florida

U.S. unions are paying increasing attention to &dquo;globalization.&dquo; From the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) struggle, through the successful effort to block &dquo;fast track&dquo; authority to extend that agreement to all of the Americas, to the protests at the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in 2000, unions have advanced considerably in their understanding of international global issues and how

Comparative Union Responses to Mass Immigration: Evidence From an Immigrant City

This article places union relationships with immigrant workers into a globalized and historical context, and utilizes primary data to examine the relationships of four unions in the heavily immigrant Miami, Florida area with immigrant workers in the past four decades. Two are building trades unions with a long exclusionary history and two are industrially organized unions, one in the service sector and one in manufacturing. Varying patterns of relationships with immigrants are discovered. Explanations for differing responses can be found in the unions structure, its traditional membership and employer characteristics, its leaderships vision and ideology, and its internal cultural practices. The paper ends with nine predictors of a unions likelihood of successfully integrating immigrants into its membership.

“Social Justice Infrastructure” Organizations as New Actors From the Community: The Case of South Florida

This article reviews the decline of U.S. unions and examines proposals for their revitalization. It also notes the emergence of new actors in working class communities to fill the void left by declining union power. Using south Florida as an example, it chronicles the growth of a “social justice infrastructure” of community organizations such as worker centers, working-class grassroots community organizing groups, faith-based worker rights groups, and labor-community coalition groups. It notes difficulties in building deep coalitions between traditional unions and such groups and explores the possibility of “networks” as a new promising organizational form. It finds limitations to the network form also, and proposes that a synergistic conjunction of various types of political and economic struggles and forms holds more promise than any one particular organizational form.

Adolph Reed on Race, Class, Black Urban Regimes, the So-Called “Underclass” and the Labor Movement: An Introduction

Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the most important political scientists with a focus on race and class issues in our time. He is also among a rather small cohort of black political theorists who steadfastly foreground the structural class dynamics of urban and African-American experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Perhaps best known for his sharp critique of the political practice of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and of subsequent African American political figures on both the local (mayoral and city council) and national levels, he has also been a trenchant critic of identity politics and the steady retreat by the self-identified “left” in the United States from confronting (rather than accommodating) the ascendancy of neoliberal politics that aims to “marketize” all human interactions and institutions under the guidance of governments firmly controlled by major capitalists and their minions. Many readers of Labor Studies Journal may not be familiar with Reed or his extensive body of work. Those who do follow his thinking and writings may be aware of it because they follow the scholarship in the field of urban affairs, or they may stay abreast of political science literature or race-based scholarly journals. Or, perhaps because Reed has been a quintessential “public intellectual” who has also published in left and progressive and popular magazines and journals (such as The Nation, The Progressive, The Village Voice, Harpers Magazine, and Jacobin) and appeared on television programs such as Bill Moyer’s PBS series, some may be acquainted with less strictly scholarly writings by this seminal thinker and theorist.

Book Reviews : Economic Development: A Union Guide to the High Road. By AFL-CIO Human Resources Development Institute. Washington, D.C.: AFL-CIO Human Resources Development Institute, 1998. 131 pp. Price n/a, paper

Far less surprising, if still quite dismaying, is learning that these major unions devoted &dquo;remarkably little&dquo; to organizing and political activity. The importance of this is underlined by the writer’s insistence that labor must &dquo;literally advance across the board...there is not much of the workforce-in demographic, occupation, and industry terms-that labor can afford to avoid.&dquo; Since the book’s publication, labor has achieved its recent first year (1997) without a net loss, and it boasted a record number of