Solidarity Unionism

Solidarity Unionism PDF Author: Staughton Lynd
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629631280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Solidarity Unionism is critical reading for all who care about the future of labor. Drawing deeply on Staughton Lynd's experiences as a labor lawyer and activist in Youngstown, OH, and on his profound understanding of the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Solidarity Unionism helps us begin to put not only movement but also vision back into the labor movement. While many lament the decline of traditional unions, Lynd takes succor in the blossoming of rank-and-file worker organizations throughout the world that are countering rapacious capitalists and those comfortable labor leaders that think they know more about work and struggle than their own members. If we apply a new measure of workers’ power that is deeply rooted in gatherings of workers and communities, the bleak and static perspective about the sorry state of labor today becomes bright and dynamic. To secure the gains of solidarity unions, Staughton has proposed parallel bodies of workers who share the principles of rank-and-file solidarity and can coordinate the activities of local workers’ assemblies. Detailed and inspiring examples include experiments in workers' self-organization across industries in steel-producing Youngstown, as well as horizontal networks of solidarity formed in a variety of U.S. cities and successful direct actions overseas. This is a tradition that workers understand but labor leaders reject. After so many failures, it is time to frankly recognize that the century-old system of recognition of a single union as exclusive collective bargaining agent was fatally flawed from the beginning and doesn’t work for most workers. If we are to live with dignity, we must collectively resist. This book is not a prescription but reveals the lived experience of working people continuously taking risks for the common good.

Solidarity Unionism

Solidarity Unionism PDF Author: Staughton Lynd
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629631280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book

Book Description
Solidarity Unionism is critical reading for all who care about the future of labor. Drawing deeply on Staughton Lynd's experiences as a labor lawyer and activist in Youngstown, OH, and on his profound understanding of the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Solidarity Unionism helps us begin to put not only movement but also vision back into the labor movement. While many lament the decline of traditional unions, Lynd takes succor in the blossoming of rank-and-file worker organizations throughout the world that are countering rapacious capitalists and those comfortable labor leaders that think they know more about work and struggle than their own members. If we apply a new measure of workers’ power that is deeply rooted in gatherings of workers and communities, the bleak and static perspective about the sorry state of labor today becomes bright and dynamic. To secure the gains of solidarity unions, Staughton has proposed parallel bodies of workers who share the principles of rank-and-file solidarity and can coordinate the activities of local workers’ assemblies. Detailed and inspiring examples include experiments in workers' self-organization across industries in steel-producing Youngstown, as well as horizontal networks of solidarity formed in a variety of U.S. cities and successful direct actions overseas. This is a tradition that workers understand but labor leaders reject. After so many failures, it is time to frankly recognize that the century-old system of recognition of a single union as exclusive collective bargaining agent was fatally flawed from the beginning and doesn’t work for most workers. If we are to live with dignity, we must collectively resist. This book is not a prescription but reveals the lived experience of working people continuously taking risks for the common good.

Solidarity Divided

Solidarity Divided PDF Author: Bill Fletcher
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520261569
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The US trade union movement finds itself on a global battlefield filled with landmines and littered with the bodies of various social movements and struggles. Candid, incisive, and accessible, this text is a critical examination of labour's crisis and a plan for a bold way forward into the 21st century.

Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity

Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity PDF Author: Paul Hampton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317554345
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book is a theoretically rich and empirically grounded account of UK trade union engagement with climate change over the last three decades. It offers a rigorous critique of the mainstream neoliberal and ecological modernisation approaches, extending the concepts of Marxist social and employment relations theory to the climate realm. The book applies insights from employment relations to the political economy of climate change, developing a model for understanding trade union behaviour over climate matters. The strong interdisciplinary approach draws together lessons from both physical and social science, providing an original empirical investigation into the climate politics of the UK trade union movement from high level officials down to workplace climate representatives, from issues of climate jobs to workers’ climate action. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in environmental politics, climate change and environmental sociology.

Transnational Labour Solidarity

Transnational Labour Solidarity PDF Author: Katarzyna Gajewska
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134018371
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
The book examines the integration of European trade union movement and explores the prospects for European or transnational solidarity among workers. Contrary to much existing research and despite national differences, Gajewska examines how trade unions cooperate and the forms in which this cooperation take place. Drawing on four case studies illustrating experiences of Polish, German, British, Latvian and Swedish trade unions in various sectors and workers’ representatives at a multinational company, this book investigates the conditions under which trade unions and workers formulate their interests in non-national / regional terms, and analyzes the character, limits and potentials of solidarity in a transnational context. Seeking to generate a new theory of European integration of labour and to contribute to sociological approaches on the European integration and Europeanization of society, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, European integration, labour/industrial relations, trade unionism and sociology.

Solidarity Unionism

Solidarity Unionism PDF Author: Staughton Lynd
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780882862088
Category : Labor movement
Languages : en
Pages : 63

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Book Description
Fred Thompson - 1900-1987 - Socialist, Wobbly, organizer, soapboxer, editor, class-war prisoner, educator, historian and publisher (it was he who spearheaded the effort to get the Charles H Kerr Company back on its feet in the 1970s). Here are lively accounts of his career as a teen-age socialist in Canada during the First World War; adventures as a hobo on the road; hard years in San Quentin; organizing for the IWW - Colorado miners in the 1920s, Detroit auto-workers in the early '30s, Cleveland metal-workers in the '40s; encounters with the mysterious Wobbly philosopher, T-Bone Slim; teaching at the IWW Work People's College; and much more. From cover to cover, this book bristles with the characteristic humor and wisdom of a self-taught workingstuff, esteemed by intellectuals as diverse as George Rawick, Studs Terkel, and Archie Green as one of the great men of our time. Compiled, edited, and introduced by David Roediger

Solidarity for Sale

Solidarity for Sale PDF Author: Robert Fitch
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 9781891620720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
American labor unions have been, it turns out, shot through with corruption from their very inception. They never really had a Golden Age. From "Big Jim" Colosimo, the patron saint of Chicago's Mafia, to Brooklyn's Sammy "The Bull" Gravano a century later, organized crime has controlled huge swaths of the mainline labor movement. It still does. Impassioned, revelatory, prodigiously researched and reported, and thoroughly convincing, Solidarity for Sale shows how the American labor movement's decent ends are continually undermined by its tawdry means — a diet of daily corruption longer than the menu at a Long Island diner. By telling the untold histories, uncovering the covered-up scandals, and even recommending a way forward, Robert Fitch builds a devastating indictment and goes beyond it to show that union corruption, stagnation, and decline are not our national destiny. Labor could regain its needed place in American life. But it would require a set of reforms deeper than anything now being proposed; nothing less than a revolutionary overthrow of its culture of corruption and its replacement by a civic culture of accountability and consent.

Labor Law for the Rank & Filer

Labor Law for the Rank & Filer PDF Author: Staughton Lynd
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1604865695
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Have you ever felt your blood boil at work but lacked the tools to fight back and win? Or have you acted together with your co-workers, made progress, but wondered what to do next? If you are in a union, do you find that it operates top-down just like the boss and ignores the will of its members? Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law is a guerrilla legal handbook for workers in a precarious global economy. It demonstrates how a powerful model of organizing called “solidarity unionism” can help workers avoid the pitfalls of the legal system and use direct action to win. Blending cutting-edge legal strategies for winning justice at work with a theory of dramatic social change from below, Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross deliver a practical guide for making work better while reinvigorating the labor movement. The book examines specific cases concerning fundamental labor rights and includes a section on tactics and principles of practicing solidarity unionism. Illustrative stories of workers’ struggles make the legal principles come alive. The New York Times has reported on the book’s importance in recent and ongoing labor organizing in the tech industry—for example among employees of Google, Kickstarter, and Uber, whose union campaigns were influenced by ideas gleaned from Labor Law for the Rank and Filer. Meredith Whittaker, a former Google research scientist who was one of the organizers of the 2018 Google employee walkout, said that the book has been “incredibly helpful in thinking through options for action, ways of building collective power, and giving workers who often aren’t familiar with labor law some working knowledge that can guide decision making.”

Solidarity Forever?

Solidarity Forever? PDF Author: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498514359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) remains one of the best examples of a labor union that traces its origins to radical anti-racist principles. Today, very few mainstream unions remain that were founded on militant, radical, and “anti-racist” principles. The ILWU remains the strongest port union in the United States, and its members are among the highest paid blue-collar union workers in the world. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival oral histories research, and ethnographic observation, Solidarity Forever? highlights the struggle of a key group of Black and women leaders who fought for racial and gender equality in the ports of Southern California. The book argues that institutional and cultural forms of racial and gender inequality are embedded within US trade union locals leading to the following deleterious consequences for unions: (1) a proliferation of internal discrimination lawsuits within unions, which can cost the union International, or union local, potentially millions of dollars in legal fees and financial settlements thereby redistributing precious financial resources that could be spent on key activities related to making unions stronger from outside attacks; (2) an erosion of trust and solidarity among workers, the key values of any successful union, which ultimately undermines the radical democratic potential of unions and rank-and-file participation in union politics; and (3) the undermining of workers of color and women workers as full and equal participants in the labor movement. The future of organized labor in the United States could very well be determined by the ability of the labor movement, and labor unions in particular, to listen to those workers who have been relegated to the margins of the global economy—workers of color, immigrant workers, women workers, and all workers in the Global South.

Union Solidarity

Union Solidarity PDF Author: Arnold M. Rose
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816659923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Union Solidarity was first published in 1952. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. A realistic knowledge of basic attitudes held by labor union members is essential to all who are concerned with social and industrial relations. Labor leaders, employers, public relations counselors, sociologists, and psychologists will find this book useful because it demonstrates how to obtain and evaluate authentic data regarding the factors which contribute to or detract from the solidarity which is manifested by organized workers. As a systematic study of the way in which a worker relates himself to his union, based upon the measurement of workers reactions, Dr. Rose's report presents a new type of research in industrial sociology. This socio-psychological study of the membership of a large union local throws light on such fundamental questions as how union members feel toward their leaders, what the members' attitudes toward their fellow unionists are, and to what extent loyalty to a union affects loyalty to an employer. For his significant study, Dr. Rose chose the membership of Teamsters Local 688, the largest union local in St. Louis, as his subject. The study had the complete backing of the union. A survey of other available studies shows that the attitudes and problems examined are characteristic of the great majority of unions and their members. Important findings of the study reveal how union leaders can educate their members toward specific viewpoints, what kinds of union activity and achievement are most responsible for a union's internal strength, and how criticism of a union on the part of its members can be compatible with basic loyalty to the union.

Anti-Communist Solidarity

Anti-Communist Solidarity PDF Author: Larissa Rosa Corrêa
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110732912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Since the 1960s, many influential Latin Americans, such as the leaders of student movements and unions, and political authorities, participated in exchange programs with the United States to learn about the American way of life. In Brazil, during the international context of the Cold War, when Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship ruled by generals who alternated in power, hundreds of union members were sent to the United States to take union education courses. Did they come back “Americanized” and able to introduce American trade unionism in Brazil? That is the question this book seeks to answer. It is a subject that is as yet little explored in the history of Latin American labor and international relations: the influence of foreign union organizations on national union politics and movements. Despite the US’s investment in advertising, courses, films and trips offered to Brazilian union members, most of them were not convinced by the American ideas on how to organize an “authentic” union movement – or, at least, not committed to applying what they learned in the States.