Union commitment and membership support for political action: An exploratory analysis

Union political activity has always been controversial, even among union members. Research has shown that a sizable minority of union members question the propriety of union political involvement and disagree with union leaders on public policy issues. It has also shown, however, that union members’ commitment to the union may be positively associated with members’ political support. This study extends this research by statistically estimating the relationship between union commitment and members’ support for their national union’s political involvement. Based on the questionnaire responses of several hundred local union members, the findings support a positive relationship between union commitment and political support. The authors wish to thank John Delaney and Cynthia Fisher and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper. They also wish to thank the numerous union participants in the study.     

The strategic role of gainsharing

Gainsharing is reported to greatly enhance organizational performance, but there is little empirical research that explains how gainsharing works and why companies adopt it. We employ a human resource control framework to examine the role gainsharing plays within the organization. Our analysis of 802 organizations suggests that gainsharing plans are used to enhance employee participation in organizations that employ marketbased control methods. Organizations that use bureaucratic or clan controls are not likely to adopt gainsharing; they are more likely to use participation initiatives that do not involve a group bonus. The authors thank Peter Cappelli, David Crawford, John Deckop, Peter Sherer, and Harbir Singh for comments on earlier drafts, Towers Perrin for access to these data, and Temple University for funding support.     

Compensation,employment, and the political activity of public employee unions

It has been hypothesized that because public employee unions are politically influential, they have a bargaining advanatage over their private-sector counterparts. Previous studies, however, have not directly measured the political activities of public employee unions and have instead usually used some type of unionization proxy. This paper uses unpublished data from the International City Managers Association to develop a more direct measure of union political activity. Using this measure, it is found that an increase in union political activity leads to higher compensation and employment for public employee union members.     

Environmental Concern of Labor Union Members in the United States

The labor and environmental movements have had a complicated relationship with periods of cooperation as well as conflict, but recently there has been increasing collaboration at the national level. Whether such a trend of cooperation can be sustained will partially depend on grassroots‐level connections between the two movements. However, there has been little empirical research on the environmental attitudes of union members, which is important for understanding the potential for shared values between union members and environmental activists. This article analyzes 1993, 2000, and 2010 General Social Survey data to examine if the environmental attitudes of people in union households have changed given shifting labor–environment relations and broader political‐economic conditions. We find that union membership does not influence environmental concern in weaker economic times (1993 and 2010) but that it has a positive effect on environmental concern in stronger economic times (2000). Thus, union households are generally no less concerned about the environment than nonunion households. Therefore, strengthening connections between union members and environmental activists may be a feasible strategy for invigorating both the labor and environmental movements.     

The choice of gainsharing plans in North America: A congruence perspective

Utilizing multinomial logit analyses of survey data from 217 organizations having experience with gainsharing plans in North America, congruence explanations of the choice of a particular type of gainsharing plan were examined. The choice of gainsharing plan was influenced by situational factors such as labor intensity, organizational size, and nonmanufacturing. Program goals, such as reducing nonlabor costs and improving labor relations, were also related to the probability of program adoption. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Union membership and perceived powerlessness in southern US textiles*

Using Marxist, mass society, organizational, and social movements literatures, we distinguish alternative accounts of the relationship between union membership and perceived powerlessness. Then, we illustrate the distinctions with survey data on southern US textile workers. Logistic and ordinary least squares regression analyses suggest two interpretations for this group of workers: union membership influences perceived powerlessness by providing members a responsive organization that contrasts with their lack of control in the workplace; and perceived powerlessness, when combined with endorsement of collective strategies for change, encourages union membership. In the southern textile case, we find that race is associated with specific ideological leanings regarding collective strategies. The location of our sample, its particular position in the political economy of the US, and the relative immaturity of its union allow for instructive comparisons with other sociological treatments of work attitudes and collective action.     

Employee perceptions of reputation: An ethnographic study

The ability of organizational members to identify and analyse stakeholder opinion is critical to the management of corporate reputation. In spite of the significance of these abilities to corporate reputation management, there has been little effort to document and describe internal organizational influences on such capacities. This ethnographic study conducted in Red Cross Queensland explores how cultural knowledge structures derived from shared values and assumptions among organizational members influence their conceptualisations of organizational reputation. Specifically, this study explores how a central attribute of organizational culture – the property of cultural selection – influences perceptions of organizational reputation held by organizational members. We argue that these perceptions are the result of collective processes that synthesise (with varying degrees of consensus) member conceptualisations, interpretations, and representations of environmental realities in which their organization operates. Findings and implications for organizational action suggest that while external indicators of organizational reputation are acknowledged by members as significant, the internal influence of organizational culture is a far stronger influence on organizational action.     

‘There Isn't Supposed To Be a Speaker Against!’ Investigating Tensions of ‘Safe Space’ and Intra‐Group Diversity for Trade Union Lesbian and Gay Organization

Trade union engagement with the continuing inequalities facing minority groups has been one of the guiding principles of attempts to re‐energize the labour movement in recent years. This article focuses on attempts by six British trade unions to create and maintain separate organizational ‘spaces’ for their lesbian and gay members. Through consideration of group representation within a union framework, the strategy of separate organizing and the complications of representing a diverse membership, this article considers issues of intra‐group diversity and ‘safe space’ for this particular group of members. It concludes that the recognition and actualization of the internally diverse lesbian and gay constituency will be important in the long term for trade unions seeking to renew their pool of potential activists.     

An Analysis of Labor Union Participation in U.S. Congressional Hearings

Using both a new data set of labor union appearances in congressional hearings and archival data on union organizational resources, this article analyzes factors that determine whether a labor union will be represented in congressional hearing testimony in a given year. Consistent with the expectations of resource mobilization theory, organizational resources are important predictors of participation in congressional hearings. For example, membership is an important predictor of testimony in hearings, as is the number of lobbyists on staff and the character of a union's primary industry. However, membership in the AFL‐CIO federation is negatively related to hearing participation, and some of the benefits of having a large membership base may be diminishing over time. Implications for the study of interest group politics and organizational political strategies are discussed.     

The Nature and Consequences of Organization-Employee and Union-Member Exchange: An Empirical Analysis

Drawing on a study of 423 union members in a UK Primary Care Trust, we use structural equation modeling to investigate the extent to which organizational and union commitment and citizenship behaviors are a function of economic and social exchange. Findings suggest that the organization-employee and union-member exchanges are distinct, with organizational commitment a function of organization-employee exchange and union commitment and citizenship behaviors (UCB) a function of union-member exchange. Findings also suggest that union commitment and UCB are motivated primarily by social exchange, with economic exchange playing a supporting role. In addition, for organizational commitment, social exchange also seemed to be relatively more important. There was no evidence that perceived industrial relations climate moderates these relationships. Implications for industrial relations and workplace social partnerships are considered.     

Union militancy among public employees: A public choice hypothesis

Public employee union membership has grown from under 6 percent to over 20 percent of all union members since 1963. This growth has been ascribed to lagging wages, inelastic demands for public products, political clout, changed laws, and reduced professionalism and public spiritedness. These explanations agree that public employees now confront their employers in a newly militant and adversarial mode. We disagree. We model this growth in membership as a continuation of old public employment relations and forecast the soon diminution of militancy.     

Politics and Identity in Cyberspace

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the use of new technologies by the rural women's group Australian Women in Agriculture (AWiA). Data from interviews with twenty members of AWiA and an analysis of organizational documents, including a number of messages posted on the group's discussion list, are used to examine the extent to which cyberspace offers a new space for political engagement for women's activism. The experiences of AWiA members offer some cause for optimism. Geographically dispersed and excluded from male-dominated public agricultural arenas, the women of AWiA have constructed a technosocial landscape that facilitates the active dissemination of information, which has been used to advance a political agenda for farming women. However, there is evidence that less powerful actors within the network whose preference was for more social discussion on the list have been marginalized in the process. For these women, space for political engagement online has been limited on the AWiA discussion list. In conclusion, the paper draws attention to the new research questions that have emerged from this study.     

Unions as value-adding networks: Possibilities for the future of U.S. unionism

VII. Conclusions The decline in private sector union density in the U.S. coincided with increased innovation at the local level. One trend in particular, value-adding unionism, may offer some hope for those who believe that workers, the economy, and the nation benefit from strong, independent trade union movement. Unions that can add value to firm performance while at the same time fulfilling their responsibilities to represent the collective and individual interests of their membership have greater appeal to potential union members seeking opportunities for both representation and participation. Since they add economic value to firms, they may also reduce the level of managerial resistance that we have seen in recent history. Farber and Western (2001) argue that the overall U.S. decline in union density is almost entirely due to falling employment in unionized firms and increases in nonunion firms. This value-adding approach offers one strategy to preserve and expand union employment in firms where it is already established, thus slowing or reversing the decline. Moreover, as structural changes in the economy have led to shifts away from sectors with high levels of union density, they have at the same time put a premium on the ability of firms to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace and the competitive environment. Value-adding unions can provide the infrastructure for organizational networks that facilitate the communication and coordination necessary to adjust to such changes. Thus, new forms of representation that provide unions and their members with greater opportunities in decision making, management, and governance can add value to both management and labor. I thank Charles Heckscher and Bruce Kaufman for comments on earlier drafts of the paper and the National Science Foundation, Rutgers University, and MIT for financial support.     

Organizational Political Economy and Environmental Pollution

Environmental scholars have made important progress explaining the social forces associated with pollution. Although important exceptions exist, insufficient attention has been given to organizations, which is where most environmental pollution is produced. Even less attentions has been given to parent companies, which have ultimate decision‐making authority over their polluting facilities. To file this gap in the literature, this paper develops an organizational political economy perspective to advance our understanding of how organizational and political‐legal arrangements affect parent companies' capacity to externalize their pollution costs to society. Organizational political economy maintains that corporations' organizational complexity, financial characteristics, management operating systems, political embeddedness in subnational states, and the degree of compliance with national and subnational environmental policies affect their capacity to externalize pollution costs. This perspective also shows how the exercise of organizational power to externalize pollution costs subsidizes the managerial and investor classes by the middle and working classes, whose taxes pay for a large share of environmental clean‐up costs, thereby contributing to economic inequality that goes beyond standard inequality measurements.     

利益代表与社会整合——法团主义视角下的武汉工会(1945-1949)

针对多元主义这一社团政治理论预设存在的盲区,本文以法团主义理论为视角,以战后武汉工会为研究对象,考察其是否具有利益代表职能及强组织凝聚力,并执行社会整合功能。研究发现,战后武汉工会不具备法团主义整合方案所要求的基本条件,其整合模式既异于国家法团主义模式,又不同于社会法团主义模式。究其原因,弱势独裁的政府始终未能实现行政权力的集中化、分层化与制度化;政府对社会的专制控制使得民间社会趋于萎缩,无法发展出充分专业化分工的社会团体。先天的不足使武汉工会只有法团主义的形而无其神,最终无法担负起社会整合的功能。     

Paradise not found: The case of insurance workers

The financial industries constitute a potential organizational paradise for the currently besieged American labor movement. This study traces the fortunes and fate of one union which has searched diligently for that paradise over the past quarter century with frustratingly little ultimate success. It finds that lack of success to have been a function of both management resistance to unionization and union insistence on pursuing its traditional organizing priorities to the exclusion of other opportunities, in large measure due to resource problems. It concludes that image and resources constitute a continuing obstacle to the unionization of the financial industries. The author gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Peter H. Glick.     

Cultural Change in the Kibbutz Factory ‘Bereshit’(Genesis): An Israeli Case Study

Abstract

Cultural changes in the ‘Bereshit’ factory have been influenced by the privatization process that has engulfed the majority of Israeli kibbutzim. In the wake of organizational difficulties and economic losses, the kibbutz management (the factory owner) appointed as factory manager someone from the outside to oversee changes, a person without commitment to current factory workers who were kibbutz members as well. This change of management accelerated the inevitable processes of change: the collectivist culture that had previously favoured kibbutz members and assigned primary importance to them, evolved into a far more capitalistic one. Today the factory is managed along purely business lines that leave no room for any obligations toward individuals. Nevertheless, the new management has adopted a dual value system: on the one hand, it supports a materialist and capitalistic approach to the worker, but on the other it fosters the image of the factory as a ‘home’ that both preserves classic collectivist values and expects its workers to feel a primary and familial obligation to ‘Bereshit’. This duality is examined in light of Schwarz’s organizational culture model.     

Collective Action,Everyday Protest,and Lived Religion

The conflict in 2001 at the Kukdong (now Mexmode) maquila garment factory is one of the rare cases of success in the wider struggle for independent unionism in Mexico. The success of the struggle, which has attracted scholars interested in the campaigns against sweatshop labour conditions and on behalf of labour internationalism, has been attributed chiefly to the role played by transnational advocacy networks in mobilizing pressure on the global sportswear giant Nike, whose brand-name, collegiate apparel was being produced in the plant. In this paper we seek not to explain why the struggle was successful, but to examine the trajectory it took over a protracted period of about nine months. We draw on McAdam et al.'s reformulation of the analysis of contentious, transgressive politics to identify three mechanisms that were particularly salient in shaping the course taken by the conflict: scale shift, actor decomposition, and brokerage. Scale shift occurred as the workers quickly escalated the conflict by broadening their demands from the resolution of particular concrete grievances to a demand for freedom of association that made the existing corporatist union, the FROC-CROC, which had a signed a protection contract with the plant's management, the principal target of opposition and challenge. Actor decomposition occurred as the workers' strategy locally and transnationally sought to isolate the FROC-CROC by detaching it from other members of the corporate–state bloc (Kukdong management, Nike, and the local political authorities). Brokerage, finally, occurred as Nike in particular was used to mediate pressure from the workers' transnational supporters (principally labour rights NGOs and the anti-sweatshop movement) on Kukdong and the local political authorities to respect the workers' right to freedom of association, which resulted in the ouster of the FROC-CROC as the legally certified union at the factory and its replacement with an independent union (SITEMEX) formed by the workers themselves.     

Toward an Alternative Analytic Approach to the Internal Politics of Unions

Abstract  This paper discusses theoretical issues in analyzing the internal politics of unions in Japan. The main argument is that the autonomy of unions' internal political processes from management should not be assumed and that the very development of internal politics of unions may be influenced by the actors with which the unions interact. The paper first reviews previous research on the internal politics of unions in Western countries and discusses a model of internal union politics based on these studies. Second, it reviews previous studies of enterprise unions in Japan and considers why these studies have been indifferent to the internal politics. Third, the paper proposes an alternative approach to internal union politics by synthesizing insights from previous studies of unions and union politics in Western countries and Japan. The approach is based on the concept of the "political space" of unions. Fourth, application of the alternative approach to the development of internal politics of the enterprise union of Yahata Steel (from 1970, Nippon Steel), the largest steel firm in Japan, shows how the union's political space has become more narrow over time. Finally, the paper concludes by noting the relevance of the proposed approach to studies of union-management relations in other industrialized countries.     

The internal union political imperative for UAW pattern bargaining

Like many industrial unions, the UAW places great emphasis on pattern-following contract settlements. However, research on the rationales for pattern bargaining has been scarce, and evidence testing these rationales has been absent. The usual rationale for pattern bargaining is to take wages out of competition. However, this paper presents evidence of important internal union political reasons for pattern bargaining. If intra-union wage comparisons cause union members to feel unfairly treated, elected leaders will be challenged. Thus, the UAW leadership pursues pattern bargaining to minimize political conflicts and maintain stability. Unless you know where you came from you don’t have the sense of direction that will lead you to the goals you seek. Walter P. Reuther That word “solidarity” isn’t rhetoric. For a union, it’s everything. Bob White Helpful comments by the Editor and an anonymous referee and financial support from the Jacob K. Javits Fellows Program, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University, are gratefully acknowledged. Walter P. Reuther collection, Box 98-2, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University (WSU). Walter P. Reuther was UAW President from 1946 to 1970. White (1987, p. 51). Bob White was Director of the UAW Canadian Region from 1978 to 1985 and has been President of the National Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of Canada (CAW) since 1985.