Kate Bronfenbrenner

The Role of Union Strategies in NLRB Certification Elections

Analyzing 1986–87 data from 261 NLRB certification election campaigns, the author finds that union tactic variables explain more of the variance in election outcomes than any other group of variables, including employer tactics, bargaining unit demographics, organizer background, election background, employer characteristics, and election environment. The results suggest that unions can significantly improve the probability of winning an election by using a rank-and-file intensive organizing strategy. This strategy includes a reliance on person-to-person contact; an emphasis on union democracy and representative participation; the building of support for the first contract during the organizing drive; the use of escalating pressure tactics; and an emphasis on dignity, justice, and fairness rather than on bread-and-butter issues.

Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-Border Campaigns

Excerpt] The chapters in this book make clear that unions have the capability to build the cross-border coalitions necessary to take on transnational corporations. The question is whether they are willing to make the fundamental ideological and cultural changes necessary to make this happen on a global scale. If they are, then maybe it will be five, not twenty years before Wal-Mart is no longer driving the global race to the bottom; before firms such as Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, Talisman, Caterpillar, and any number of large pharmaceutical companies will no longer be able to profess to be good corporate citizens in some countries and operate entirely outside the law in others. All of us who put so much work into the conference and into this volume did so because we believe that unions and their allies do have the capacity to change and become a global movement. But most important of all, we believe that with these changes, the balance of power, like the arc of history, will finally be tilting away from capital toward workers, their unions, and communities in both the Global North and Global South.

Organizing Women The Nature and Process of Union-Organizing Efforts Among U.S. Women Workers Since the mid-1990s

This article examines the intersection of gender and union strategies and how that has played out in labor’s continued efforts at revitalization through organizing. Using a combination of macro Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Labor Relations Board data along with findings from an in-depth survey of 412 National Labor Relations Board election campaigns, the research examines the impact of company characteristics, bargaining union demographics, and employer and union tactics across bargaining in units where women predominate, in mixed units, and in units where men predominate. The article concludes that although women continue to make up the majority of new workers being organized (despite some notable exceptions), most unions organizing women workers continue to run fairly weak ineffectual campaigns. Women also remain seriously underrepresented in staff and leadership positions in most unions. Most important, there are entire sectors, such as finance and insurance and much of the retail sector, where women predominate but have been almost untouched by organizing.

Race, Gender, and the Rebirth of Trade Unionism

Excerpt] Diversity is not the enemy of solidarity. We contend that solidarity can, and must, be built among an ever-diversifying labor movement, nation, and world. The labor movements very survival depends on it.

New Unity for Labor

From the “Editor’s Introduction”: Within today’s AFL-CIO, a different set of frustrations with the bureaucratic structure and leadership is simmering. The relative lack of new organizing and the continuous toll of jurisdictional rivalries have produced a call for radical restructuring, or “New Unity Partnership” (NUP). As articulated by the leaders of some of the most powerful and dynamic of federation affiliates, including the Service Employees International Union’s president Andrew L. Stern, the promise (or threat, depending on one’s point of view) of the NUP deserves full scrutiny. To that end, we are pleased to present a forum organized by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss of the University of California’s Institute for Labor and Employment, focused on the core concepts of the NUP proposal. The edited discussion features four labor policy experts: Stephen Lerner, director of the SEIU’s Building Services Division and a leading NUP draftsman; Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Dan Clawson, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Jane Slaughter, of Labor Notes.

1. Beating Global Capital: A Framework and Method for Union Strategic Corporate Research and Campaigns

As unions around the globe struggle to survive in the face of the globalization of firms combined with unprecedented employer opposition to unions, it is clear that new approaches, strategies, and tactics are imperative. The ways of organizing and bargaining forged during the 1950s and 1960s in many industrialized nations – approaches that often relied heavily on the law and administrative proceduralism – have been deeply challenged as workers now find themselves on a world stage employed by global firms. If labor has any hope of remaining a source of power for working people on the job and in their communities, it must find a way to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by global capital in this new environment.

Steelworkers' Victory at Ravenswood: Picket Line Around the World

The second in a two-part series details the sophisticated international campaign and grass-roots activism that gave labor one of its biggest wins in the ′90s.