AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: What's Next for Organized Labor?: Report of the Century Foundation Task Force on the Future of Unions by Twentieth Century Fund/Century Foundation, Century Foundation Task Force on the Future of Unions, Twentieth Century Fund ISBN: 0-87078-418-8 Publisher: Twentieth Century Fund Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: With few exceptions, mostly inconsequential
Comment: In keeping with their mission of examining economic and political issues and policies, The Century Foundation convened a task force of labor union officials, industrial relations academics, lawyers, businessmen, and others to analyze the "grim" slide of labor unions from representing thirty-five percent of the U.S. workforce a half-century ago to barely fourteen percent at the end of the twentieth century. As might be suspected, the nonpartisanship of the Foundation and the differing perspectives of the task force members resulted in rather limited, even inconsequential, findings as to what direction the labor movement should take to reverse their slide.

This report established the unremarkable finding that unions at sufficient density raise members pay relative to the non-unionized segment, reduce the possibility of extreme pay differentials, increase the rate of health insurance and pension coverage, and tend to increase political participation. Of course, the task force uniformly agreed that unions need to rebound to continue to receive these benefits. One of several side recommendations calls for unions to strategically organize through targeting organizable sectors, to consolidate unions, to promote unions as assets in high-performance workplaces, to ally with their global counterparts, and to raise labor's voice on behalf of all working people. The task force fails to mention that the labor movement has considerably stepped up these efforts over the last few years with quite modest results.

Other members focused on labor laws and their interpretation by courts and the National Labor Relations Board as a major hurdle for unions to overcome to organize new members. The basic labor law of the land permits employers to dominate the process by which workers supposedly are free to choose who will represent them. Under the current legal regime, employers can use both coercive and illegal tactics to prevent the establishment of a union with little concern for punitive measures being taken against them.

But there is no chance that the legal situation will change for unions and working people unless a wholesale transformation occurs in public thinking; there simply will be no political mandate. A task force member, Nelson Lichtenstein, declares that "trade unions will need to engineer a political and cultural breakthrough that sways the hearts and minds of millions and millions of people who today see the unions as irrelevant, or even hostile, to their interests." A "classwide insurgency" will be required.

Lichtenstein also presents a background article on the labor movement since the 1930s. It is clear that through the vehicle of labor unions a sizeable portion of the working class gained substantial economic and political citizenship. But equally clear is the fact that the labor movement facilitated those gains at considerable costs. Labor unions were expected to police their memberships in accordance with the provisions of collective bargaining agreements and to eliminate class-based militancy from within their ranks. In an era of an alleged labor-management accord, the labor movement lost the social and political power necessary to respond to the various forces that became seriously arrayed against them by the mid-1970s. The slide has been continuous since that time. A more complete picture of the slide of unions is available in Lichtenstein's recent book: "State of the Union."

This task force as a whole was unwilling to squarely admit that class warfare has occurred in the U.S. over the last thirty years and that the working class lost and is losing. Organizing a few pockets of workers here and there, coordinating with some foreign labor bodies, and running slick political ads do not constitute a labor turnaround. The working class must adopt stances of militancy, insurgency, and participatory democracy to even think about turning around their situation. But beyond isolated cases of such resolve, there is virtually no evidence that a significant revival is even remotely imminent.

Similar Books:

	Title: Why Unions Matter by Michael Yates ISBN: 0853459290 Publisher: Monthly Review Press Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.00
	Title: Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the Twenty-First Century (Frank W. Pierce Memorial Lectureship and Conference Series, No. 11) by Lowell Turner, Harry Katz, Richard Hurd, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations ISBN: 0801487129 Publisher: Ilr Pr Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95
	Title: State of the Union : A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein ISBN: 0691116547 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 28 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95
	Title: American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century by Robert H. Zieger, Gilbert J. Gall ISBN: 080187078X Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95
	Title: Building More Effective Unions by Paul F. Clark ISBN: 0801487056 Publisher: Ilr Pr Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95