Download or read book Alt Labor and the New Politics of Workers Rights written by Daniel J. Galvin and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2024-02-02 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last half century, two major developments have transformed the nature of workers’ rights and altered the pathways available to low-wage workers to combat their exploitation. First, while national labor law, which regulates unionization and collective bargaining, has grown increasingly ineffective, employment laws establishing minimal workplace standards have proliferated at the state and local levels. Second, as labor unions have declined, a diversity of small, under-resourced nonprofit “alt-labor” groups have emerged in locations across the United States to organize and support marginalized workers. In Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights, political scientist Daniel J. Galvin draws on rich data and extensive interviews to examine the links between these developments. With nuance and insight, Galvin explains how alt-labor groups are finding creative ways to help their members while navigating the many organizational challenges and structural constraints they face in this new context. Alt-labor groups have long offered their members services and organizing opportunities to contest their unfair treatment on the job. But many groups have grown frustrated by the limited impact of these traditional strategies and have turned to public policy to scale up their work. They have successfully led campaigns to combat wage theft, raise the minimum wage, improve working conditions, strengthen immigrants’ rights, and more. These successes present something of a puzzle: relative to their larger, wealthier, and better-connected opponents, alt-labor groups are small, poor, and weak. Their members are primarily low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color who are often socially, economically, and politically marginalized. With few exceptions, the groups lack large dues-paying memberships and are dependent on philanthropic foundations and other unpredictable sources of funding. How, given their myriad challenges, have alt-labor groups managed to make gains for their members? Galvin reveals that alt-labor groups are leveraging their deep roots in local communities, their unique position in the labor movement, and the flexibility of their organizational forms to build their collective power and extend their reach. A growing number of groups have also become more politically engaged and have set out to alter their political environments by cultivating more engaged citizens, influencing candidate selection processes, and expanding government capacities. These efforts seek to enhance alt-labor groups’ probabilities of success in the near term while incrementally shifting the balance of power over the long term. Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights comprehensively details alt-labor’s turn to policy and politics, provides compelling insights into the dilemmas the groups now face, and illuminates how their efforts have both invigorated and complicated the American labor movement.
Download or read book The Right and Labor in America written by Nelson Lichtenstein and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by leading American historians explains how and why the fight against unionism has long been central to the meaning of contemporary conservatism.
Download or read book A New American Labor Movement written by William E. Scheuerman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American labor movement isn't dead. It's just moving from the bargaining table to the streets. In A New American Labor Movement, William Scheuerman analyzes how the decline of unions and the emergence of these new direct-action movements are reshaping the American labor movement. Tens of thousands of exploited workers—from farm laborers and gig drivers to freelance artists and restaurant workers—have taken to the streets in a collective attempt to attain a living wage and decent working conditions, with or without the help of unions. This new worker militancy, expressed through mass demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, political action, and similar activities, has already achieved much success and offers models for workers to exercise their power in the twenty-first century. Finally, Scheuerman notes, many of the strategies of the new direct-action groups share features with the sectoral bargaining model that dominates the European labor movement, suggesting that sectoral bargaining may become the foundation of a new American labor movement.
Download or read book Milking Outdated Laws written by Kati L. Griffith and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though alt-labor does not have significant labor market power when compared to labor unions, its impacts are manifold. Alt-labor has given rise to novel state and local legislation improving wages and working conditions for low-wage workers across the country. It has fostered new collaborations with government enforcement agencies to improve the implementation of rights on the books -- to “make rights real.” It has promoted new bargaining and worker organizing strategies, outside of traditional models. This article highlights another achievement of alt-labor. Alt-labor has served as a catalyst for creative litigation efforts that argue for application of existing workplace protections to non-traditional populations of workers and their organizing efforts. In this way, it has pushed to reinterpret, and thus to revitalize, what many perceive to be outdated labor and employment laws. We focus on initiatives that re-imagine the interpretation of these laws in light of new organizing strategies and new global economic realities, all the while staying true to the existing laws on the books. Along with raising questions, and proposing new interpretations of New Deal and civil rights era gains, sometimes alt-labor's litigation efforts are successful and lead to case law “wins.” To build its approach, the article draws from literature on litigation as a social movement strategy and provides an in-depth analysis of the ways courageous dairy workers in upstate New York have inspired innovative litigation theories and successes. Alt-labor's achievements as a litigation catalyst are laudable -- given the challenge of enacting federal legislation to address income inequality and the decline of labor union power -- in the current era.
Download or read book A New Labor Movement for the New Century written by Gregory Mantsios and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays offers an inside view of the current state of American unions. Most of the contributors are prominent activists in the AFL-CIO, and their writings assess the state of the movement in the late 1990s.
Download or read book Presidential Party Building written by Daniel J. Galvin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern presidents are usually depicted as party "predators" who neglect their parties, exploit them for personal advantage, or undercut their organizational capacities. Challenging this view, Presidential Party Building demonstrates that every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower worked to build his party into a more durable political organization while every Democratic president refused to do the same. Yet whether they supported their party or stood in its way, each president contributed to the distinctive organizational trajectories taken by the two parties in the modern era. Unearthing new archival evidence, Daniel Galvin reveals that Republican presidents responded to their party's minority status by building its capacities to mobilize voters, recruit candidates, train activists, provide campaign services, and raise funds. From Eisenhower's "Modern Republicanism" to Richard Nixon's "New Majority" to George W. Bush's hopes for a partisan realignment, Republican presidents saw party building as a means of forging a new political majority in their image. Though they usually met with little success, their efforts made important contributions to the GOP's cumulative organizational development. Democratic presidents, in contrast, were primarily interested in exploiting the majority they inherited, not in building a new one. Until their majority disappeared during Bill Clinton's presidency, Democratic presidents eschewed party building and expressed indifference to the long-term effects of their actions. Bringing these dynamics into sharp relief, Presidential Party Building offers profound new insights into presidential behavior, party organizational change, and modern American political development.
Download or read book City of Workers City of Struggle written by Joshua B. Freeman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York’s labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories—how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance—it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy written by Angela B. Cornell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.
Download or read book No One Size Fits All written by Janice Fine and published by Labor and Employment Research Association. This book was released on 2018 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together stories of innovative efforts that are being made to improve working conditions across the country, while acknowledging the structural dynamics that challenge and condition them in twenty-first century America. The title, No One Size Fits All, is both intended to capture the diverse strategic narrative of workers’ rights campaigns and to stand as a corrective to the idea that there is a single organizational model or strategy. While there is a great deal of experimentation we have not covered, we hope that what is documented in this book demonstrates the breadth and depth of the creative search for leverage that has been taking place across space and time. We hope that it does justice to the continual craft, test and to recraft strategy and tactics that is continually enacted by unions, worker centers, economic justice coalitions, community organizing groups, and partner research, legal advocacy, policy organizations and allied elected officials.-- Site web de UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Download or read book Rethinking Political Institutions written by Ian Shapiro and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutions shape every dimension of politics. This volume collects original essays on how such institutions are formed, operated, and changed, both in theory and in practice. Ranging across formal institutions of government such as legislatures, courts, and bureaucracies and intermediary institutions such as labor unions and party systems, the contributors show how these instruments of control give shape to the state, articulate its relationships, and express its legitimacy. Rethinking Political Institutions captures the state of the art in the study of the art of the state. Drawing on some of the leading scholars in the field, this volume includes essays on issues of social power, public policy and programs, judicial review, and cross-national institutions. Rethinking Political Institutions is an essential addition to the debate on the significance of political institutions, in light of democracy, social change and power. Contributors: Elisabeth S. Clemens, Jon Elster, John Ferejohn, Terry M. Moe, Claus Offe, Paul Pierson, Ulrich K. Preuss, Rogers M. Smith, Kathleen Thelen, Mark Tushnet, R. Kent Weaver, Margaret Weir, Keith E. Whittington
Download or read book Knocking on Labor s Door written by Lane Windham and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power of unions in workers' lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor law--with legislative gains from the civil and women's rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor's decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing. Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor's future. Windham's story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women's history.
Download or read book The Allure of Labor written by Paulo Drinot and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals how Perus early-twentieth-century labor reforms excluded the majority of the countrys laborers. They were indigenous, and the nations elites saw indigeneity as incommensurable with work, modernity, and industrial progress.
Download or read book Understories written by Jake Kosek and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.
Download or read book Conservation Is Our Government Now written by Paige West and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.
Download or read book Beaten Down Worked Up written by Steven Greenhouse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick
Download or read book Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada written by Barry Eidlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are unions weaker in the US than they are in Canada, despite the countries' many similarities?
