TY - JOUR T1 - Innovation and Adaption: Contrasting Efforts to Organize Home Care Workers in Four States JF - Labor Studies Journal Y1 - 2006 A1 - Mareschal, Patrice M. KW - anti-unionism KW - home care workers KW - organizing KW - SEIU KW - union density AB -

This paper chronicles the SEIU's efforts to organize home care workers in California, Oregon, Washington, and New York. Drawing on interviews with union leaders and organizers as well as secondary source data, I compare the political strategies employed and the outcomes achieved in these states. Across the cases, the SEIU changed its organizing strategy to adapt to the unique environmental characteristics of each state. Despite the anti-union animus of federal labor law, the labor movement can still achieve important organizing successes, albeit at great expense in time and resources. Employees of private-sector companies that rely primarily on taxpayer funds may prove to be fertile sources of new union members, and unions with a track record of success in both the public and private sectors may be best positioned to stem the long-term decline in American union density.

VL - 31 L2 - eng CP - 1 J1 - Labor Studies Journal ER - TY - BOOK T1 - Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement Y1 - 2004 A1 - Ruth Milkman A1 - K. Voss KW - labor movement KW - leadership KW - organizing KW - rank and file KW - SEIU KW - union AB -

Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization. Throughout this collection, the focus is on the formidable challenges unions face today and on how they may be overcome. Rebuilding Labor begins with a comprehensive overview of recent union organizing in the United States; goes on to present a series of richly detailed case studies of such topics as union leadership, organizer recruitment and retention, union democracy, and the dynamics of anti-unionism among rank-and-file workers; and concludes with a quantitative chapter on the relationship between union victories and establishment survival. This interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on New Labor offers a window into an otherwise invisible emergent social movement. (publisher's statement)

PB - Cornell University Press CY - Ithaca, NY L2 - eng N1 - ID: nyu_aleph001143110; Includes bibliographical references (p. 281]-293) and index. ER -