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Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement

Online ISBN:
9780197539880
Print ISBN:
9780197539859
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement

Judith Stepan-Norris,
Judith Stepan-Norris
Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
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Jasmine Kerrissey
Jasmine Kerrissey
Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Labor Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Published online:
22 June 2023
Published in print:
10 August 2023
Online ISBN:
9780197539880
Print ISBN:
9780197539859
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Union Booms and Busts takes a bird’s-eye view of the shifting fortunes of U.S. workers and their unions, on the one hand, and employers and their organizations, on the other. Using newly assembled and detailed data, it analyses union density across eleven industries and 115 years, demonstrating that workers in some industries and some time periods were remarkably successful in forming and defending unions, while others were not. Union Booms and Busts traces the approaches that workers used, including organizing strategies, strikes, and union elections, as well as those of employers, including disrupting union organizing by using legal maneuvers, workforce-based strategies, and race and gender divisions. Chapters are organized around time periods—the early unregulated period where unions took hold in only a handful of industries; the mid-century regulated period where strikes, elections, and union density grew in many industries; and the later dis-regulated period where union trajectories diverged, with union density drastically declining in most industries and holding steady in a few. Each chapter begins with a depiction of the economic, legal, and political context of the time as well as important historical trajectories. The book concludes by suggesting what might come next for workers and unions in America.

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