The article argues that 'renewal' and 'crisis' are inadequate descriptors of the current state of the American and Canadian labour movements. Many of the structural and strategic shifts that have remade labour unions in North America over the past two decades -including new organizing strategies, bargaining outcomes and political strategies -speak rather to a contradictory reconstitution of organized labour along neoliberal lines and the impasse of the renewal project. If there is a crisis in the labour movement, it is a crisis in the nature of trade unions as working-class organizations. The article builds this argument through, in turn, a historical overview, a critical reading of the labour renewal literature and a discussion of current trade union practice.
Policy interventions geared toward improving the quality of gig economy work depend not only on how this work is classified in legal terms but also on a fine-tuned understanding of the relevant factors that determine the quality of the gig 'work relationship'. Models that are used to evaluate standard work, however, are poorly adapted to gig work. This article proposes a 'work relationship' model adapted to the gig economy. The model is inspired by Dunlop's systems approach and is constructed from 24 in-depth interviews with gig economy workers. A survey generated from the model was used to verify the relevance of 3 macro-level and 12 micro-level factors. Its main findings are that income, labour protections, voice and client behavior are the most significant factors in determining the quality of work and of work relations as determined by gig workers.
A number of service-sector unions in the United States have turned to urban land-use strategies in alliance with community organizations to achieve organizing goals and sustain bargaining regimes in a hostile environment. These union strategies typically entail the formation of project-specific "common cause" coalitions with community organizations in order to leverage local benefits, living wages, and union rights from private developers and growth-oriented local governments. The labor studies literature on community unionism understands these strategies through the analytical frame of social movement theory, and closely associates them with labor movement renewal. In approaching the question from the perspective of critical human geography, this article highlights a contradiction that emerges in labor's land-use campaigns in cases where redevelopment entails the transformation of working-class neighborhoods into spaces of production and luxury consumption. The article argues that a strategy of negotiating distributional shares out of prospective increases in land values in such cases encourages union-community coalitions to prioritize workplace over residential demands, in turn reproducing structural divisions between labor and community. The argument is sustained through a discussion of the involvement of the New York City hotel workers union, UNITE-HERE Local 6, in a labor-community coalition formed to contest the terms of the redevelopment of Coney Island. The case study casts some doubt on whether labor-community land use strategies of this type are consistent with labor movement renewal.
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