Ruth Milkman

Organizing immigrants : the challenge for unions in contemporary California

Recruiting the growing numbers of immigrants into union ranks is imperative for the besieged U.S. labor movement. Nowhere is this task more pressing than in California, where immigrants make up a quarter of the population and hold many of the manual jobs that were once key strongholds of organized labor. The first book to offer in-depth coverage of this timely topic, Organizing Immigrants analyzes the recent history of and prospects for union organizing among foreign-born workers in the nations most populous state. Are foreign-born workers more or less receptive to unionization than their native-born counterparts? Are undocumented immigrants as likely as legal residents and naturalized citizens to join unions? How much does the political, cultural, and ethnic background of immigrants matter? What are the social, political, and economic conditions that facilitate immigrant unionization? Drawing on newly collected evidence, the contributors to this volume explore these and other questions, analyzing immigrant employment and unionization trends in California and examining recent strikes and organizing efforts involving foreign-born workers. The case studies include both successful and unsuccessful campaigns, innovative and traditional strategies, and a variety of industrial and service sector settings.

The macrosociology of paid domestic labor

This article poses the question: What explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in paid domestic labor? In contrast to an older, modernization-theory-based literature that argued that paid domestic labor declines and ultimately disappears in the course of economic development, the authors note the occupations recent expansion in southern California and the wide variations among rich, developed countries in the proportion of the female workforce employed in it. The authors argue that a crucial, neglected factor in explaining such geographic variations is the extent of economic inequality. This factor is overlooked not only in the modernization-theory-based literature but also in recent microsociological studies of paid domestic labor, which highlight the ways in which race, ethnicity, and citizenship status are implicated in interactions between employers of domestics and the workers themselves, while ignoring the enduring significance of class in the employer/domestic relationship. By analyzing 1990 census data for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, the authors show that income inequality (as well as, but independent of, the proportion of the female labor force made up of African Americans and Latinas, the proportion of the female labor force that is foreign born, and maternal labor force participation), is a significant predictor of the proportion of the female labor force employed in domestic labor.

Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles: Lessons from Three Rounds of Negotiations

We examine an important recent organizing success of the US labour movement: the ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign in Los Angeles. This campaign has spanned a complete business cycle and shows the union’s capacity for growth over time. It illustrates the potential for unions to overcome pro–employer bias of labour laws, as well as their efficacy in appealing to the wider public. It exposes the importance of building coalitions, as well as the value of union analysis of legal, industrial, and political conditions. Our analysis suggests conditions under which unions might survive and thrive in the service sector in the twenty–first century.

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.

The New American Workplace: High Road or Low Road?

Extravagant claims about workplace transformation have proliferated in the late twentieth-century US, as corporate experiments with various forms of worker participation have captured the imaginations of managers and social scientists alike. Traditional, top—down forms of organising work have increasingly been criticised in favour of such innovations as employee involvement, quality circles, pay-for-knowledge, multi-skilling, and teamwork. These techniques have spread from manufacturing to the service sector, and can be found in unionised as well as non-union settings. The new ‘high-performance’ workplace has been credited both with raising productivity (and thus competitiveness) and with enhancing the quality of workers’ daily lives on the job. It is often portrayed as a means of alleviating the nation’s economic malaise, and at the same time as a form of workplace democratisation, since the various participatory and skill-enhancing schemes it comprises include workers in processes and activities that were formerly monopolised by management. Indeed, evidence that workers themselves prefer the new forms of work organisation to more traditional ones is accumulating (although this remains an under-researched aspect of the phenomenon). Many observers see workplace reform as a key prerequisite for moving toward a high-skill, high-wage economy — the ‘high road’ for human resource management.

Technological Change in an Auto Assembly Plant: The Impact on Workers' Tasks and Skills.

This article explores the impact of technological change and organizational restructuring on workers at the General Motors assembly plant in Linden, New Jersey. An in-plant worker survey was conducted as well as extensive interviews with workers, managers, and union officials. Changes in the plant polarized the work force: Skilled trades workers have experienced skill upgrading and gained more responsibility for maintaining and managing the new equipment, while production workers have undergone deskilling and find themselves increasingly subordinated to the new technology.

Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy

Unfinished Business documents the history and impact of Californias paid family leave program, the first of its kind in the United States, which began in 2004. Drawing on original data from fieldwork and surveys of employers, workers, and the larger California adult population, Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum analyze in detail the effect of the state’s landmark paid family leave on employers and workers. They also explore the implications of California’s decade-long experience with paid family leave for the nation, which is engaged in ongoing debate about work-family policies.Milkman and Appelbaum recount the process by which California workers and their allies built a coalition to win passage of paid family leave in the state legislature, and lay out the lessons for advocates in other states and localities, as well as the nation. Because paid leave enjoys extensive popular support across the political spectrum, campaigns for such laws have an excellent chance of success if some basic preconditions are met. Do paid family leave and similar programs impose significant costs and burdens on employers? Business interests argue that they do and routinely oppose any and all legislative initiatives in this area. Once the program took effect in California, this book shows, large majorities of employers themselves reported that its impact on productivity, profitability, and performance was negligible or positive.Unfinished Business demonstrates that the California program is well managed and easy to access, but that awareness of its existence remains limited. Moreover, those who need the program’s benefits most urgently—low-wage workers, young workers, immigrants, and disadvantaged minorities—are least likely to know about it. As a result, the long-standing pattern of inequality in access to paid leave has remained largely intact.

Back to the Future? US Labour in the New Gilded Age

This article argues that the twenty‐first century US labour movement has increasingly come to resemble its counterpart in the Gilded Age 100 years ago. Starting in the 1970s, deindustrialization and deregulation have gradually undermined the New Deal labour relations system, and have led to the proliferation of precarious labour. The labour movement then began to experiment with alternative labour organizing strategies and increasingly sought out political alliances with other progressive movements, reproducing practices that were widespread among US unions prior to the New Deal era. Although many of these experiments have succeeded on a small scale, they face intransigent opposition from employers and anti‐union organizations, and whether they can be expanded enough to generate a new labour movement upsurge remains to be seen.

Critical Mass: Latino Labor and Politics in California

LAST YEAR’S MASSIVE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS marches heralded the emergence of a new civil rights movement in the United States. But while this wave of popular protest heartened the progressive community, it also sparked a considerable backlash. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stepped up its workplace raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants in recent months, while also intensifying its efforts to police the border. Carefully orchestrated to maximize media exposure, these selective enforcement initiatives carry enormous symbolic weight, even if they have virtually no practical effect on reducing the numbers of unauthorized immigrants—as many as 12 million, according to some estimates—who live and work in the United States today. ICE’s displays of force, along with growing locally based efforts to intimidate and expel foreign-born residents from some communities, seem calculated both to terrorize undocumented immigrants and their families, and to placate the right-wing anti-immigrant political camp that is such an important Republican constituency. But immigrant communities, composed of both documented and undocumented immigrants (often in the same families and households), are themselves now deeply politicized, as last year’s marches made plain. Naturalization applications have soared in the last year, along with new voter registrations among eligible immigrants, although these developments have received far less media attention than the ICE raids and the ongoing mobilization of xenophobic forces. And whatever the short-term prospects of immigration-reform legislation in the new Congress, it is clearly impossible to put NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS

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.