In this first-ever collection of labor anthropology from around the world, the contributors to Uncertain Times assert that traditional labor unions have been co-opted by neoliberal policies of corporate capital and have become service organizations rather than drivers of social movements. The current structure of labor unions facilitates corporations’ need for a stable labor force while reducing their power to prevent outsourcing, subcontracting, and other methods of undercutting worker security and union power. Through case studies from Switzerland, Israel, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Greece, Sweden,Turkey, Brazil and Spain, the authors demonstrate that this process of neutering unions has been uneven across time and space. They also show that the potential exists for renewed union power based on more vociferous and creative collective action. These firsthand accounts—from activist anthropologists in the trenches as union members and staff, as well as academics analyzing policy, law, worker organizing, and community impact—illustrate the many approaches that workers around the world are taking to reclaim their rights in this ever-shifting labor landscape.
Uncertain Times is the first book to use this crucial comparative, ethnographic approach for understanding the new rules of the global labor struggle and the power workers have to change those rules. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology of work, and labor studies; labor union leadership; and others interested in developing innovative methods for organizing working people, fomenting class consciousness, and expanding social movements.
Contributors: Alpkan Birelma, Emma Braden, Maria Eugenia de la O, Christopher Kelley, Staffan Löfving, Gadi Nissim, Darcy Pan, Steven Payne, Alicia Reigada, Julia Soul, Manos Spyridakis, Christian Zlolniski
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.
After Upton Sinclair's powerful novel appeared in 1906, “the jungle” became a compelling metaphor for life and work in the nation's meatpacking industry. Harsh living and working conditions from the killing floor to the hide cellar to the packingtowns, cycles of overwork and underemployment, and the ever-present crowds of new and unskilled laborers characterized an often-violent industry in which the appetite of workers for the protection of unions was exceeded only by the zeal of their employers to prevent workers from organizing. Unionizing the Jungles—which originated in a seminar at the University of Iowa sponsored by the Center for Recent United States History—brings together historians and anthropologists whose studies of various phases of the meatpacking industry, its unions, and its impact on communities in the twentieth century both raise and answer important questions.
The rise and decline of industrial unionism in the packinghouse industry is a unique story that casts into bold relief the conflicts between labor and capital and the tensions based on race and gender in a perpetually changing workforce. The essayists in Unionizing the Jungles discuss the structurally distinctive features of the packinghouse industry—such as the fact that violence and extreme antiunionism were central elements of its culture—the primary actors in the union-building process, the roots of the distinctive interracialism of the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the explosion of industrial unionism in the 1930s, and the community-based militant unionism of the Independent Union of All Workers. Central themes throughout these essays include the role of African American workers, the constant battle for racial equality, and the eruption of gender conflict in the 1950s. Structural and technological changes in the corporate economy, the increased mobility of capital, and a more hostile political economy all contributed to the difficulties the labor movement faced in the 1980s and beyond.
Focusing on the workplace and the community as arenas of conflict and accommodation, the new labor historians in these vigorous essays consider the historical and contemporary problems posed by the development of the packinghouse industry and its unions and reflect on the implications of this dramatic history for the larger story of the changing relations between labor and capital in mass production.
Brooks analyzes a two-pronged problem in consumer boycott campaigns against labor abuse in the garment industry. First, how are we to understand the political necessities of local protest such as the right to unionize against the emphasis placed on consumer boycotts? Second, what and whose agency is privileged or obscured within the symbolic economies and the politics of information deployed by these campaigns? Tying both of these questions together is a commitment to seeing globalization as embedded in the everyday realities of the local.
Drawing attention to the race, class, and gender assumptions central to powerful consumer boycotts, Brooks reveals how these movements unintentionally reinforce the global economic forces they denounce.
Ethel C. Brooks is assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and sociology at Rutgers University.
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