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Introduction: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
... Nevertheless, these approaches present their own challenges. A union-based lobbying approach for 'institutional security' (Clegg, 1976) provides a less risky source of political influence than relying on voluntarily mobilising and organising members at local-level to build critical mass (Heery and Adler 2004;McAlevey 2016). While Irish unions have devoted increased attention to organising campaigns (with variable results), even advocates identify challenges like employer hostility and finite resources (Geary and Gamwell, 2019;Murphy, 2016, Murphy andTurner, 2014). ...
Anglophone countries address the question of workplace‐level union bargaining rights via the mechanism of statutory recognition. Existing literature has evaluated such regimes as underpinned by several weaknesses. In contrast, Ireland presents an unusual case whereby the question of bargaining rights is resolved via collective dispute resolution procedures combining voluntary and statutory provisions. However, employer challenges and civil court rulings resulted in the weakening of these procedures from a trade union perspective. We assess the latest attempts to reform the Irish provisions via the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act 2015, evaluating the implications for unions and their capacity to represent members' on pay and working conditions in comparison to Anglophone statutory recognition regimes.
... They explained that doing so would yield a better strategy and plan, and that such engagement was vital in order for members to buy in to the fight ahead. Without having read her book, these representatives were articulating one of McAlevey's (2016) most important lessons: ...
... ou J.McAlevey (2016), qui ont développé une armature conceptuelle plus riche, ainsi que de nouveaux outils et des procédures d'organisation formalisées. Le community organising a donc bien changé et la flamboyance d'Alinsky, qui organisait des actions 6En 1964, le maire de Chicago refuse de respecter les promesses qu'il a faites quelques mois plus tôt à l'Alliance Citoyenne. ...
Alors qu'en France le community organizing fait ses premiers pas, Saul Alinsky devient un repère dominant.
Certes, il est important de connaître l'auteur de "Rules for Radicals". Cette figure historique permet de mieux comprendre les origines du community organizing et le développement de cette méthodologie jusque dans les années 1970. Toutefois, des disciples de Saul Alinsky appliquent aujourd'hui ses préceptes au pied de la lettre, et justifient par là même des pratiques discutables : philosophie a-morale qui dépolitise les mouvements sociaux ; banalisation des outils de démarchage anglo-saxons ; management néo-libéral qui engendre de la souffrance chez les militants. En d'autres termes, ce que certains appellent aujourd'hui "méthode Alinsky", qui se revendique souvent comme seule forme "efficace" d'organizing, est une conception rétrograde de l'organisation collective.
Le présent article se donne pour objet de réévaluer l'héritage conceptuel d'Alinsky, mais aussi de déterminer les raisons pour lesquelles il est aujourd'hui nécessaire de remettre en cause sa fétichisation.
... With these points in mind, diff erent approaches have been conceptualised for describing and analysing relations between trade unions and their members (Heery and Kelly 1994;Snape and Redman 2004;McAlevey 2016). Three approaches to member-union relations have been identifi ed: they can be labelled the 'professional relationship', the 'participative relationship' and the 'managerial relationship'. ...
... Mucho depende de la propia identidad y estructura del propio sindicato, de su concepción de la afiliación y de su grado de integración institucional en el mercado laboral y el sistema de bienestar social. El lobbying puede ser una fuente alternativa y menos arriesgada de influencia política que la movilización y organización de los afiliados (Heery y Adler 2004;McAlevey 2016). El contexto socioeconómico y la conducta de los empleadores son otras explicaciones de las diferencias transnacionales en las respuestas de los sindicatos (Frege y Kelly 2003). ...
Las diferencias en los niveles de sindicalización entre los diversos países siguen siendo sustanciales y, en general, los países menos sindicalizados en el periodo 2000-2009 han seguido a la cola en la década posterior, mientras que los países con un nivel medio o alto también han mantenido esta posición, con independencia de la forma en que ha evolucionado la sindicalización. Los países que presentan una densidad sindical moderada o alta han sido capaces, por lo general, de limitar el descenso de la afiliación o incluso de aumentarla. Sin embargo, en conjunto, las tasas de afiliación y de densidad sindical están disminuyendo en la mayoría de los países, y muy drásticamente en Europa Central y Oriental. Los sindicatos no solo están teniendo dificultades para que la afiliación evolucione en línea con las crecientes tasas de desempleo, sino que están también envejeciendo.
Aunque la brecha existente entre la sindicalización de los trabajadores jóvenes y mayores no es nueva, la cifra de personas jóvenes que han accedido a un sindicato ha retrocedido en los últimos años en la mayoría de los países europeos. La edad media de los afiliados está creciendo y supera a la de los trabajadores asalariados en general. Simultáneamente, aunque los jóvenes suelen tener una visión positiva de los sindicatos, carecen de conocimientos sobre ellos. Ante esta pérdida simultánea de afiliación e ingresos, queda por conocer en qué medida serán capaces los sindicatos de abordar los retos generacionales y de afiliación, algo que dependerá en buena medida de la identidad del sindicato y de la formulación de los desafíos, la concepción de la afiliación y su recurso a las cuotas de afiliación como medio para lograr su sostenibilidad organizativa. En cualquiera de los casos, la magnitud de los desafíos generacionales y de afiliación también exige que los sindicatos tiendan la mano a otros interesados en ayudar a reforzar la seguridad sindical, además de aplicar las propias iniciativas (de captación y organización).
... En Angleterre, les community organisers considèrent Alinsky comme une lecture utile mais dépassée. Ses écrits (Alisnky, 2012) sont désormais dans l'ombre de ses successeurs, tels qu'Ed Chambers (Chambers & Terkel, 2003), Michael Gecan (2012) ou J. McAlevey (2016), qui ont développé une armature conceptuelle plus riche, ainsi que de nouveaux outils et des procédures d'organisation formalisées. Le community organising a donc bien changé et la flamboyance d'Alinsky, qui organisait des actions spectaculaires, a laissé place à un travail 41En 1964, le maire de Chicago refuse de respecter les promesses qu'il a faites quelques mois plus tôt à l'Alliance Citoyenne. ...
Le community organising naît d'un constat simple : dans les sociétés démocratiques, les injustices sont causées par l'impuissance des citoyens. Dès lors, pour défendre la justice sociale, il est nécessaire de développer un pouvoir citoyen durable, qui permette de demander régulièrement des comptes aux élus, aux administrations et aux entreprises. Pour ce faire, le community organising consiste à fédérer en Alliances Citoyennes les citoyens et les organisations de la société civile (associations, écoles, syndicats et groupes cultuels) afin de développer leur capacité collective d'action et de revendication.
Ce chapitre s'inscrit comme un récit d'expérience accompagné de repères théoriques. Il s’appuie sur mon expérience pendant deux ans comme community organiser pour l'association Citizens UK, durant laquelle j’ai pu contribuer à développer une Alliance Citoyenne d'ampleur régionale regroupant les principales communes du comté de l'Essex au Royaume-Uni (en particulier la ville moyenne de Colchester, 200 000 habitants).
... At this point, it is useful to emphasise the distinction between mobilising and organising activities (McAlevey, 2016). Mobilising refers to motivating supporters to take action while organising refers to expanding the supporter base by building relationships with nonsupporters. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review “institutional experimentation” for protecting workers in response to the contraction of the standard employment relationship and the corresponding rise of “non-standard” forms of paid work.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on the existing research and knowledge base of the authors as well as a thorough review of the extant literature relating to: non-standard employment contracts; sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and entities that subvert the employment relationship.
Findings
Post-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model of collective bargaining and the standard employment contract as a “web of rules”. As work relations have become more market mediated, new institutional arrangements have developed to govern these relations and regulate the terms of engagement. The paper argues that these are indicative of an emergent “patchwork of rules” which are instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.
Research limitations/implications
While the review of the institutional experimentation is potentially instructive for developing solutions to gaps in labour regulation, a drawback of this approach is that there are limits to the realisation of policy transfer. Some of the initiatives discussed in the paper may be more effective than others for protecting workers on non-standard contracts, but further research is necessary to test their effectiveness including in different contexts.
Social implications
The findings indicate that a task ahead for the representatives of government, labour and business is to determine how to adapt the emergent patchwork of rules to protect workers from the new vulnerabilities created by, for example, employer extraction and exploitation of their individual bio data, social media data and, not far off, their personal genome sequence.
Originality/value
The paper addresses calls to examine the “institutional intersections” that have informed the changing ways that work is conducted and regulated. These intersections transcend international, national, sectoral and local units of analysis, as well as supply chains, fissured organisational dynamics, intermediaries and online platforms. The analysis also encompasses the broad range of stakeholders including businesses, labour and community groups, nongovernmental organisations and online communities that have influenced changing institutional approaches to employment protection.
... While the mobilization of workers lends weight to the unions' demands, these public activities are usually not related to workplace organising strategies. As such, existing campaign approaches reproduce a political logic that has become widespread within the trade union movement over the last few decades: instead of engaging in long-term organising based on workers' activities, self-organ- ising and reflection, workers are merely mobilized for single issues (McAlevey 2016). As a result, unions no longer aim to change power relations at the shop floor but rely on naming and shaming strategies (Choudry and Kapoor 2013, p. 15 f.). ...
Today, the organisation of the global apparel sector is characterized by global production networks (GPNs) that link actors at the different steps of the value chain from production to consumption. GPNs in the apparel sector are usually set up and controlled by large transnational retailers connecting their suppliers with their headquarters and stores. Sincere tailers seek to increase their profits by reducing labour costs, labour intensive production activities are sourced out to independent subcontractor firms located predominantly in countries in the Global South where wages are low and labour organizationis weak. After the introduction of the Multifibre Arrangement in 1974, big European and US corporations, such as Walmart, H&M and Nike established large and geographically dispersed networks of suppliers of ready-made garments (RMG),with Asia being the biggest sourcing hub. Although the emergence of an export garment industry has played an important role info stering economic development in Asian countries, it has been achieved at the expense of the millions of workers in the supplier factories. Governments aim to promote the international competitiveness of their ready-made garment export sectors and to attract buyers from the Global North by maintaining low wages and implementing labour laws that allow for greater workforce flexibility.. Thus, child labour, extremely low wages, insufficient health and safety provisions, excessive overtime and high levels of pressure at work characterize the reality in workplaces in the RMG export industry in many Asian countries.
As a response, over the last few decades, garment workers in Asia have developed strategies of resistance to fight against exploitative practices and policies by employers and government institutions at the international, national and subnational level. In most garment-exporting countries, particularly in South and South-East Asia, the labour movement is weak and fragmented, with trade unions dominated by political parties. But the expansion of the garment export sector has also brought about the development of a number of labour unions in this industry, which, rather than seeking institutional power through proximity to a political party, aim to build associational power through a social movement approach.
... Perhaps the most trenchant critique of the contemporary U.S. labor movement is Aronowitz (2014); see also McAlevey (2016); Scipes (2017); as well as Fletcher and Gapasin (2008). For an excellent history of labor in the United States, see Murolo and Chitty (2001). 2 Obviously, there are different versions of trade unionism in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand- the other so-called "developed" countries-from which American workers could also learn. ...
Arguing there are alternatives to the generally moribund trade unionism currently found in the United States, this article presents the Kilusang Mayo Uno Labor Center of the Philippines, an exemplar of social movement unionism, as providing one alternative developing among labor organizations in the Global South. It presents a theoretical discussion of social movement unionism. It seeks to ascertain if the KMU is still conducting social movement unionism, or it has reverted back to economic or political unionism. It reports a 2015 trip across the three major regions of the country by this researcher—after six trips between 1986 and 1994—where the situation is detailed and the KMU's efforts are examined. It finds that the KMU is still implementing social movement unionism. It illustrates one alternative to U.S. trade unionism, and suggests that the workers around the world might consider learning from a southern labor center such as the Kilusang Mayo Uno.
... Afin de mieux comprendre l'approche des syndicats à l'égard des livreurs, cette problématique sera abordée sous deux angles : la nouvelle réglementation belge applicable au « capitalisme de plateforme » et les stratégies actuelles des syndicats à l'égard de l'évolution des structures de pouvoir (McAlevey, 2016). Historiquement, la notion d'organizing a contribué à forger l'identité des syndicats belges, mais, au moins depuis les années 1990, la plupart d'entre eux ont essentiellement combiné advocacy et mobilisation 1 . ...
La Belgique affiche depuis les années 1990 un taux de syndicalisation élevé et stable, malgré l’absence quasi totale de stratégie d’organizing de la part des syndicats. Cependant les adhésions ont cessé de progresser récemment. L’essor du capitalisme de plateforme, à l’instar des entreprises de livraison de repas avec des livreurs souvent jeunes, peut être l’occasion de tester la stratégie d’organizing jusqu’ici peu utilisée et de démontrer que les syndicats peuvent jouer un rôle important dans le processus de transition de l’école au monde du travail.
... While areas in the South currently face deindustrialization pressures, especially in legacy industries like the textile and apparel industry (Zieger 2012), other North-South movements of production, especially the movement of core production activities in large manufacturing sectors such as automobile (Holmes 2004) and aeorospace (Trimble 2015), persist. This has led contemporary observers to point to the large number of manufacturing workers as a potential source of expansion for union organizing campaigns (McAlevey 2016). ...
The North American labor movement continues to wrestle with the challenges of organizing workers in the US South. This article explores the contradictory position of the South in the contemporary labor movement, using the circulation of the 15 wage movement into, throughout, and back out of the South.
... It introduces some of Riis" analytical work on the dire situation of immigrants in the NYC tenements 1880-1910-what he termed "cockroach capitalism"-and recommends in particular a number of Riis' short stories, largely still ignored in social justice teaching anywhere. The article also relates in a range of ways to teaching contemporary global/glocal issues with a focus on immigration realities under immiseration capitalism and its myriad aporias, a System in Shambles, and is replete with relevant hyperlinks: in a sense looking at concrete social deprivation in the 'Gilded Age' from the context of a critical pedagogy in the "New Gilded Age" (McAlevey, 2016) today. One aspect centrally stressed for social justice pedagogy is honing critical social empathy through the minifictions Riis authored-and also through honing empathic visual literacy, utilizing some of Riis" 'exposure journalism' photography of the poor and homeless (which Riis pioneered as a muckraker social photographer). ...
The article seeks to contribute to working-class and social justice pedagogy by developing concrete angles on teaching/exploring some of the (a) short fiction, (b) journalistic-photographic work and (c) sociography of poverty by the Danish-born US immigrant, muckraker (http://goo.gl/6WeGtM) and social reformer Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914, http://goo.gl/xmNDTD), a writer and activist still too little known outside the U.S. The article suggests approaches for teaching material by Riis as a focus in a critical EFL classroom, centered on real historical and contemporary social issues such as poverty in capitalist relations of production, immigration and its myriad aporias. Through the prism of Riis, it suggests looking at concrete social deprivation in the ‘Gilded Age’ from the context of a critical pedagogy in the ‘New Gilded Age’ (McAlevey, 2016) today, also with classroom materials for today, including David Rovics’ political folksong. On one level, the article is largely aimed at practicing EFL teachers. More broadly, it seeks to contribute to a neglected area in Marxist and social-anarchist critical pedagogy in this journal, namely ideas for concrete alternative curriculum and their practical teaching within the cybervortex of an exacerbating capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 1967; 1988). The article is also grounded on a material fact too little foregrounded in critical pedagogy discourse: the openness for introducing CP approaches/questions specifically within a burgeoning subject area (TEFL) that has spread globally as default imperial lingua franca. TEFL has no set disciplinary ‘subject content’: the door potentially is uniquely wide open in EFL classes in many countries to talking/writing critically about political, socioeconomic and environmental issues, global, glocal, local. The present article expands somewhat on TEFL as a contested transnational space for introducing and experimenting with CP and social justice pedagogy. © 2017, Institute for Education Policy Studies. All rights reserved.
Can a union be both democratic and administratively efficient, or are these goals always at odds? Building on the Webbs’ focus on this critical question, this article analyses and compares the changing administrative policies and practices of US, UK and Australian trade unions over a 25‐year period. We conducted surveys of unions in all three countries to gather information on union policies and practices involving the unions’ human resources, hiring, budgeting and strategic planning. Using these novel longitudinal data, we contribute to industrial relations scholarship by showing that unions have increasingly adopted formal, systematic practices in these areas. The article is grounded in theory and also has practical relevance given the important implications that our findings may have for the revitalization of unions in the three countries and beyond.
Local communities around the world are directly exposed to impacts of climate change. It is also clear that many local governments are politically and economically constrained in their capacity to implement needed adaptations. These constraints can restrict adaptation options to incremental, or even maladaptive, practices. At the same time, necessary transformational actions may remain out of reach for local actors. Building on five years of collaborative research with the city of Flagler Beach (FL, USA), we draw on political process theories to describe how incremental adaptation activities that are possible within current constraints can serve to build local capacity for instigating reforms at higher scales of social organization. We use the concept of a collective action strategy to conceptualize how context-specific barriers to adaptation can be overcome. From our analysis, an idealized multi-step process for designing collective action strategies is presented. The study advances scholarship on limits to adaptation beyond the diagnosis of barriers to action by taking steps towards developing context-specific strategies for overcoming these barriers.
Dualist, as against dialectical, thinking is seen to dominate the understanding of both informal and precarious work. We pose instead the centrality of labor in the making of capital and vice versa. An alternative approach to globalization and labor is posed that breaks with dualist thinking. As against the legalization or formalization frame to deal with informality and precarity we pose an organizing frame centered on the trade unions developing a social movement strategy.
The current attack on the administrative state and its more inclusive policies is accompanied by a push to limit judicial deference to administrative rulemaking. This recent trend stands in tension with the #MeToo movement and a shift in constitutional culture regarding sexual misconduct that has been developing over several decades. While the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has continued to expand what counts as discrimination on the basis of sex under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (recently adding sexual orientation to that list), and the Supreme Court has recognized some of these expansions, #MeToo invites rethinking what Title VII has and has not accomplished for women, why, likely prospects for addressing sexual misconduct, and the limits of law.
Community organizations and trade unions rely to a certain extent on a committed membership to be effective. It can be difficult, however, to build solidarity when there are diverse members with competing interests and this can lead to internal conflicts. Based on participant observation and interviews, this article examines how membership organizations have been able to maintain an active grassroots base and overcome internal crises through the development of a relational organizing culture.
Social movements drive economic, social, political, and cultural change. But who – or what – makes movements? This chapter argues that leadership plays a critical but poorly understood role in social movements. It argues that a failure to distinguish among discrete qualities of leaders, authority structures through which leadership is often exercised, and what leaders actually do inhibits understanding social movements. A failure to focus on leadership practice has limited understanding of the internal dynamics of social movement organizations (SMOs), differences between social movement and SMO leadership, and processes by means of which moments of enthusiasm and indignation – often reactive – may or may not be turned into effectively strategic movements. The literature is reviewed, lacunas are identifies, and an alternative theoretical framework for the study of social movement leadership is proposed.
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