Reviving the Strike by Joe Burns

Author:Joe Burns
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: non.fiction, economics
ISBN: 9781935439240
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Published: 2011-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

MINORITY UNIONISM AND NEW THINKING

The crisis in labor today has prompted some theorists and activists to reexamine the crucial characteristics of a union and to look back to earlier forms of unionism. Law professor Clyde Summers wrote an article in the mid-1990s arguing that unionists should jettison the entire concept of exclusive representation, which he called “a uniquely American principle.”32 This idea, that unions do not need a majority of the workers in a shop in order to form a union, is known as “minority unionism.”d

Over the past few decades, numerous efforts have been made to develop a strong minority unionism movement. For example, since the early 1980s, Black Workers for Justice has organized African American workers in North Carolina expressly for this purpose. Similarly, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) sponsored a minority at the NCR Corporation during the 1990s.33 In many states where collective bargaining is not permitted for public employees, unions have organized workers in minority unions. Most recently, the Industrial Workers of the World formed a Starbucks Workers union in 2004.34

Advocates of minority unionism hearken back to a pre-NL-RA version of trade unionism, where the union existed because of the self-organization of the workers involved, rather than as an entity authorized by the federal government. During the heyday of traditional trade unionism, a small group of workers would often secretly form a union, which other workers were recruited to join. When a critical mass was reached, the union would expand its activities. The nature and extent of membership was determined by the number of employees who were active or who paid dues, not by government elections and bargaining units. Trade unionists back then also understood that they needed to show that they could be victorious before workers would have enough confidence to join the union en masse.

Whether majority or minority, however, unions face the same problem: how to force an employer to make economic concessions. Without an effective, production-halting strike, advocates of minority unionism can do little more than engage in relatively weak public pressure campaigns against employers. While they have been able to win occasional victories—most notably in November 2010, when, after three years of struggle, the IWW as able to pressure Starbucks to award time and a half pay for employees who worked on Martin Luther King’s birthday—advocates of minority unionism have not been able to alter the wage structure in an industry.35 That is why, like conventional unionists, advocates of alternative forms of unionism must grapple with the central question of how to revive an effective strike if they truly want to change the status quo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.