Lowell Turner

The Politics of Labour Movement Revitalization: The Need for a Revitalized Perspective

One important common theme of our five-country research is that all union movements see political engagement as essential in their efforts at revitalization. Specific forms of political action, however, vary according to national context. If unions find or build adequate political and institutional supports, they have less incentive to mobilize the membership, organize the unorganized, build coalitions with other groups, or give support to grass-roots initiatives. The irony is that a strong institutional position can reduce incentives to organize, which may be essential to sustain long-term influence; yet organizing unions in America and Britain are hard pressed to sustain gains in the absence of adequate institutional supports.

From Transformation to Revitalization: A New Research Agenda for a Contested Global Economy

This introductory article offers an overview of the contemporary labor movement revitalization perspective. Moving beyond the transformation of industrial relations literature of the 1980s and 1990s, this growing body of work has emerged in response to contemporary realities, to address above all the urgency of innovative union strategies in the face of dramatically worsening international and domestic conditions. There are two central arguments in the revitalization literature. The first is that contemporary circumstances provide openings for a resurgence of social movement unionism. The second is that such strategies matter: They have been instrumental in promoting workplace, social, and political change, and they contain as well the potential for breakthroughs in labor movement and broader democratic revitalization.

Reviving the American Labour Movement: Institutions and Mobilization

The current revitalization of the American labour movement is driven primarily by two forces: from above, new strategic leadership in some unions and at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), ready to offer institutional support for local efforts to organize, build coalitions and expand the scope of grass-roots politics; from below, renewed interest in rank-and-file activism and participation. We call these two forces institutional support and network mobilization, and we find indications of their overriding importance in all six union strategies on which our case-study research focuses: organizing, political action, coalition building, labour-management partnership, organizational change and international solidarity.

Institutions and Activism: Crisis and Opportunity for a German Labor Movement in Decline

In recent decades, German unions have rested on their institutional laurels even as the ground has slipped away. This article analyzes two recent innovative campaigns based on grassroots mobilization that, the author argues, offer possibilities for renewed union strength. A breakthrough campaign against a militantly anti-union firm in the retail industry demonstrates the potential for a German brand of social movement unionism. The story line and institution-building strategy of this campaign fall entirely outside the framework of traditional German industrial relations. A second, very different campaign, from deep inside that traditional framework, has mobilized union members in Nordrhein-Westfalen (IG Metalls largest district) for active engagement in contract negotiations and membership growth. Together, these two stories challenge existing perspectives on once stable German industrial relations, point toward inadequacies of prominent contemporary theories of institutional stability and change, and suggest constraints and opportunities for a German labor movement in need of strategic reorientation.

Transnational cooperation among labor unions

Organized labor faces enormous challenges in the increasingly global economy. The effect of multinational corporations, the portability of technology and capital, and lowered trade barriers in international commerce have all sparked widespread prophecies of trade union demise. This book, however, presents compelling evidence that unions can survive and grow if labor is willing to cooperate across national borders. Transnational Cooperation among Labor Unions is a seminal study of such cooperation as an effective weapon against the exploitation of workers in todays world.After assessing the challenges confronting organized labor, the authors turn their attention to specifics. They describe and evaluate the most important transnational labor associations, campaigns, and transnational cooperatives in a variety of industries. Contributors include academics who have assessed the status of union-management relations and international labor organizations as well as participants in union campaigns organized across national boundaries.

Globalization and the Logic of Participation: Unions and the Politics of Coalition Building:

Global liberalization is driving a ‘logic of participation’, for firms and unions alike. Economic pressures drive managers to innovate across a range of possibilities, from outsourcing and union busting to work reorganization and labor-management partnership. Those same pressures, reflected largely through the strategic choices of employers, also force unions to innovate - from concession bargaining and cooperation to coalition building and international solidarity. Because employers are increasingly tempted by strategies that seek to weaken or marginalize unions, sustained participation for unions arguably requires a new period of activist mobilization. This article explores one significant component of renewed labor mobilization: union coalition building. Based on a case study of coalition efforts in the United States between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club from 1999-2004, concepts and causal linkages are suggested for broader analysis. Research findings presented here indicate the following causal processes at work: union strategies, defining moments and spillover combine to drive coalition building processes that include events, campaigns and institution building - ranging from local to national and global levels. Beyond this US-based case, a framework for cross-national comparative analysis is also suggested.

The survival of the Danish model : a historical sociological analysis of the Danish system of collective bargaining

Part 1 A theoretical basis for the analysis of industrial relations - the development of institutions: the end of institutions? Part 2 The Danish system of collective bargaining - the origins of the Danish system negotiation rules and concatenation the third actor structural stagnation. Part 3 Centralized decentralization - complementary concepts: degrees of centralization a surge in structural development towards the year 2000.

East German Productivity and the Transition to the Market Economy.

Comparative industrial productivity in East Germany - an overview methods and descriptions of the sample comparative company performance prospects for the future explanations of comparative performance - machinery explanations of comparative performance - management and labour force other explanatory factors - environment, premises and business services policy and the competitiveness of East Germany - comparisons with western and eastern Europe comparisons of East and West Germany and Northern Ireland.

Reviving the Labor Movement: A Comparative Perspective

In recent years, the long-declining U.S. labor movement has refocused in new and promising ways on rank-and-file mobilization, in organizing drives, collective bargaining conflicts and political campaigns. Such efforts are widely viewed as the best hope for revitalizing the labor movement: breathing new life into tired old unions, winning organizing drives and raising membership levels, increasing political influence, pushing toward the power necessary to reform labor law and ineffective labor institutions. The stakes are high and the goals ambitious: to close the “representation gap” at the workplace, reverse growing economic and social inequality, and build new coalitions for expanded democratic participation in local, national and global politics.

A Diversity of New Work Organization: Human-Centered, Lean, and In-Between

In response to changing world markets, intensified competition, new technologies and worker demands, managers everywhere are required to reorganize work in important and sometimes profound ways. Such innovation, part of larger processes of industrial restructuring and production reorganization, is one of the central features of the modern workplace. But the new processes and impacts of work reorganization can be interpreted in different ways.