Remodeling the House of Labor

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ “The Triangle Factory Fire,” < http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/narrative2.html>.

² Torben Iversen, Contested Economic Institutions: The Politics of Macroeconomics and Wage Bargaining in Advanced Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Isabela Mares, The Politics of Social Risk (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Peter Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets (New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 2002).

³ Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People's Movements (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

⁴ Jennifer Gordon, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

⁵ Michael H. Belzer, Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

⁶ At the same time, “sweatshop” can be used to “refer not to specific conditions of work but to the powerlessness of the workers.” See Jill Louise Esbenshade, Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 14. Thus, even an increasing number of well-educated white-collar workers, such as the Microsoft “permatemps” who organized the CWA-affiliated Washington Alliance of Technology, whilst hardly working in anything approaching a “traditional” sweatshop nonetheless face a precarious existence as the “temporary” employees of contracting companies, denied access to the health and leave benefits of the master employer, and unable to collectively bargain because of their independent status.

⁷ Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 262–263.

⁸ Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), p. 78; Lichtenstein, op. cit., pp. 111–112.

⁹ Taylor Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance, 2^nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 48.

¹⁰ Peter L. Francia, The Future of Organized Labor in American Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 23, 40. On organizing new members, George Meany once stated, “Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not appear to want to be organized?” See Taylor Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance, 2^nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 40.

¹¹ Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), p. 125. Frank discusses labor's quiescence on civil rights issues: “The labor movement was itself part of the problem African Americans faced: During the 1950s and ‘60s lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed suit after suit demonstrating the complicity of AFL-CIO unions in keeping African Americans out of union jobs.” See Taylor Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance, 2^nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) Lichtenstein observes, however, that some unions did show tangible support for the notable social movements of the 1960s independently of the AFL-CIO. See Lichtenstein, op. cit., p. 187.

¹² Francia, op. cit., pp. 44–46.

¹³ Change to Win website, “Pledge Statement,” < http://www.changetowin.org/about-us/our-pledge.html>.

¹⁴ See Margaret Levi, “Organizing Power: Prospects for the American Labor Movement,” Perspectives on Politics 1:1 (2003), pp. 45–68; Ruth Milkman, “Critical Mass: Latino Labor and Politics in California,” NACLA Report on the Americas 40:3 (2007), pp. 30–36.

¹⁵ The EFCA would facilitate organizing by: 1) reducing the procedure to form a union to a card-check recognition that does not require an NLRB-certified election, 2) regulating the period between union recognition and the first contract negotiation to result in better contracts for newly organized employees, and 3) increasing penalties for employers who violate NLRB regulations during card-check and first contract negotiations. See AFL-CIO website, “Summary of the Employee Free Choice Act,” < http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/upload/EFCA_Summary.pdf>.

¹⁶ “UFCW Lauds Settlement of Union-Backed Lawsuits against Albertson's Illegal Practices,” U.S. Newswire, November 30, 1999.

¹⁷ Wal-Mart Class website, < http://www.walmartclass.com/public_home.html>; Brad Seligman, “Patriarchy at the Check-out Counter,” New Labor Forum 14:1 (2005), p. 40.

¹⁸ Molly Selvin, “Workers Win Major Court Ruling; California Justices Say Employees Can File Class-action Lawsuits Even If They've Signed Arbitration Agreements,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2007.

¹⁹ Margaret Levi and April Linton, “Fair Trade: A Cup at a Time?” Politics & Society 31:3 (2003), pp. 407–432. Also, see Richard Locke et al., “Beyond Corporate Codes of Conduct: Work Organization and Labour Standards at Nike's Suppliers,” International Labour Review 146:1-2 (2007), pp. 21–40.

²⁰ Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

²¹ Kent Wong and Carolina Bank Munoz, “Don't Miss the Bus: The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride,” New Labor Forum 13:2 (2004), pp. 61–66; Ruth Milkman, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), p. 10.

²² Victor Narro, Janna Shadduck-Hernandez, and Kent Wong, “The 2006 Immigrant Uprising: Origins and Future,” New Labor Forum 16:1 (2007), pp. 48–58.