TY - JOUR T1 - Non-Majority North Carolina: Cummins Diesel Engine Workers Breathe New Life into an Old Organizing Model JF - New Labor Forum Y1 - 2015 A1 - Strauss, Mariya KW - collective bargaining KW - community organizations KW - corporations KW - industry KW - labor KW - racism KW - union democracy KW - unorganized workers KW - working class AB -

[Excerpt] Loud, dirty diesel engines move just about every load imaginable. Their smoke and roar are so ubiquitous that one’s brain almost does not register them; yet every piece of heavy construction equipment, every big-rig truck, every school bus, most boats, and many of the pickup trucks on the road run on diesel. And the engines are big business. Cummins, Inc., which manufactures and distributes diesel engines, reported a whopping $1.2 billion in profits for the third quarter of 2014; shares of its stock are expected to rise by as much as 15 percent this year. But that large pile of cash has not flowed equitably to the workers at Cummins’ engine assembly plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, one of eleven such Cummins facilities in the United States. The Rocky Mount plant, located in eastern North Carolina’s Black Belt, has about a thousand employees, with another three hundred or so temp and subcontracted workers doing everything from working the assembly line to providing housekeeping, painting, and other services for the plant. The Rocky Mount facility has a majority African-American workforce. Globally, Cummins employs a workforce of 47,900 people. The Rocky Mount Engine Plant (RMEP) is nestled in the northeast quadrant of the least-unionized state in the country: just 2.9 percent of North Carolina’s workers belong to unions, and seven years after the start of the Great Recession, its unemployment rate remains among the highest in the nation. Against those punishing odds, and without a majority of workers signing union cards, thirty-year employee Jim Wrenn, who serves as president of the Carolina Auto, Aerospace & Machine Workers Union (CAAMWU), a branch of the United Electrical Workers (UE) Local 150, and his coworkers at RMEP have built a union anyway.

VL - 24 L2 - eng UR - http://www.ueunion.org/sites/default/files/CAAMWU%20Article%20New%20Labor%20Forum%202015.pdf CP - 2 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Beyond the Union-Centred Approach: A Critical Evaluation of Recent Trade Union Elections in China JF - British Journal of Industrial Relations Y1 - 2014 A1 - Hui, Elaine Sio-ieng A1 - Chan, Chris King-Chi KW - China KW - strike-driven elections KW - strikes KW - union democracy KW - union elections AB -

Many Western scholars have regarded union democracy and elections as affairs that are internal to trade unions and unconnected with outside forces. Going beyond the mainstream union-centered approach, this study critically assesses one significant type of union election that has been emerging in China since 2010 and that has been driven by different forces from previous elections. Previous workplace union elections had been ‘top-down’ — initiated by the party-state or its apparatuses, or else transnational corporation-induced — but this newer type of election has been driven by workers' strikes. This study illustrates how the dynamics among the quadripartite actors — party-state, higher-level trade unions, capital and labor — have shaped these strike-driven elections. Contrary to the claim that these elections have been ‘direct’ and ‘democratic’, our case studies show that they have been indirect and quasi-democratic in nature.

VL - Article first published online: 1 DEC 2014 L2 - eng UR - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjir.12111/abstract ER - TY - RPRT T1 - What is a Workers’ Referendum for? Evidence from Italy Y1 - 2014 A1 - Carbonai, Davide A1 - Drago, Carlo KW - Italy KW - survey research KW - union democracy KW - Workers’ Referendum AB -

In July 2007, the Prodi government and representatives of the three main Italian trade union confederations signed a landmark agreement on welfare and economic development. In October, in order to ratify or reject the agreement, the Italian labor movement organized a referendum, i.e. the Workers’ Referendum of 2007, inviting workers, pensioners and the unemployed to assess the agreement. Based on a comprehensive sampling (1,574 interviewees), these research notes provide an analysis of the Workers’ Referendum with regard to both key societal voting features and attitudes toward unions.

PB - MPRA Paper CY - University Library of Munich, Germany L2 - eng UR - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2521005 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Workplace Empowerment and Disempowerment: What Makes Union Delegates Feel Strong? JF - Labor Studies Journal Y1 - 2014 A1 - Murray, Gregor A1 - Christian Lévesque A1 - Catherine LeCapitaine KW - disempowerment KW - education sector KW - empowerment KW - new public management KW - shop steward KW - union delegates KW - union democracy KW - union renewal KW - workplace union delegate AB -

This study of workplace union delegates in the education sector identifies a typology of the experience of workplace union representatives according to their assessment of their degree of influence in their workplace and their union and their degree of control over their work as a union representative. When combined, these two assessments yield different types of disempowerment and empowerment. While workplace context plays an important role in delegates’ degree of control, their influence in the workplace and union is strongly associated with different types of power resources (internal and external networks) and strategic capabilities (learning and articulating or bridging). Unions seeking to increase workplace representative influence should therefore look to the reinforcement of delegates’ power resources and strategic capabilities while looking at how to reinforce their ability to deal with more difficult contexts associated with feeling a loss of control.

VL - 39 L2 - eng CP - 3 ER -