Katie Quan

Homecare Worker Organizing in California: An Analysis of a Successful Strategy

This paper examines the challenges facing California homecare workers in their historic struggle to unionize from the 1980s through the 90s. Three inter-related components were critical to their ultimate success: 1) grassroots organizing, 2) changing policy at the state and county level and 3) working in coalition with groups of senior and disabled care recipients. Now that the union repre sents more than 100,000 workers, consolidation of those victories involves challenges such as developing leadership among the new membership and strengthening the labor-consumer coalition that will be critical to further improvements in homecare services and working conditions. This campaign has already had significant impact on the structure of this emerging workforce, and will have long-term effects on social policy for care of the elderly and dis abled.

Use of Global Value Chains by Labor Organizers

Understanding global value chains is important for labor as well as business. However, to be useful for labor organizers, workers must first be located as entities in global value chains. Further modification can reveal possible strengths and weaknesses in the chain, identify worker allies and reveal necessary steps in the organizing process. This paper examines ways that labor educators have modified global value chains to teach workers about their industries, and uses two case studies to illustrate the application that global value chains have to comprehensive organizing campaigns. The paper argues that labor organizers should go one step further by using global value chains to conceptualize global plans to stabilize employment for workers after the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, and to raise wages in this context.

Evolving Labor Relations in the Women’s Apparel Industry

Charles Whalen’s book identifies avenues leading to the revitalization of industrial relations as an academic discipline. The contributors, a stellar assemblage of the field’s leading scholars, demonstrate there is much work to be done: the scope and intellectual content of industrial relations need to be reconsidered; academic and social institutions must be reshaped; and new conceptual and practical issues demand attention.