Reviving the American Labour Movement: Institutions and Mobilization

Abstract

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.

National Culture and Union Membership

“…Labour unions are institutions that may flourish when they are perceived as legitimate (Bronfenbrenner, 1997;Hurd, Milkman and Turner, 2003). This study extends prior research on union membership in several ways.…”

The New Solidarity? Trade Union Coalition-Building in Five Countries

“…It follows that the effectiveness of particular forms of coalition will depend on factors that are contingent to union movements and to their environments. In the United States, it has been noted that the most effective coalitions are those that rely upon bridge-builders, involve rank and file mobilization, and leadership support and endure, evolving through iterative action (Brecher and Costello 1990;Hurd, Milkman, and Turner 2003). Our information from the other four cases is just too sketchy to pronounce with certainty whether these same conditions underpin success elsewhere.…”

Organizational Contexts for Union Renewal

“…This was achieved on the one hand through grassroots mobilization and coalition building, and on the other through shrewd use of publicity campaigns against building owners (who ultimately decided to hire unionized contractors). The SEIU combined bottom-up mobilizing with bureaucratic clout (Hurd, Milkman, and Turner, 2003;Milkman, 2006) to obtain employers' agreements to recognize the union once 60% of the market's workforce signed cards in favour of union representation (Yu, 2008). As indicated earlier, relatively little is known about the internal organizational reforms the SEIU underwent, the impact of the JfJ on local unions, and outcomes for participation.…”

“…The bulk of the vast literature on union revitalization has focused on strategies for enhancing unions' capacities for reversing the tide of de-unionization. Behrens, Hamann and Hurd, (2004) defined revitalization as a multidimensional process and identified four dimensions for union revitalization in a framework that has been widely used since (Frege and Kelly, 2004;Hurd, Milkman, and Turner, 2003;Phelan, 2007;Turner, 2005). These include three activity dimensions-mobilization, economic power and political power-and one organizational dimension-institutional vitality.…”

“…These include three activity dimensions-mobilization, economic power and political power-and one organizational dimension-institutional vitality. While the first three have been extensively covered in the literature since Behrens and colleagues' formulation of the model (Hurd, Milkman, and Turner, 2003;Milkman, 2006), arguably the least understood dimension of union revitalization is 'institutional vitality'. Behrens et al defined it as a union's "capacity to adjust to new contexts, internal enthusiasm to embrace new strategies, and a sense of introducing something new and 'fresh' to the union that is not adequately captured by the other three dimensions" (Behrens, Hamann and Hurd, 2004: 22).…”