Hiring Hall Research Articles

"It's the most important work we will ever do": Chiropractic students, servicelearning experiences at a day laborer center in California.

From 2009 to 2019, staff, students, and faculty volunteers from a chiropractic college started Mission Trip America, later re-named Service Trip America (STA), providing monthly free chiropractic services at a hiring hall for day laborers in San Francisco until the 2020 COVID-19 hiatus. We report on volunteers' service-learning experiences. Mixed-methods analysis comprising document review, descriptive report of site visit records, and thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 12 student and faculty volunteers. STA conducted 104 visits (8-11 per year) including 2272 patient encounters. Document review revealed an average of 22 patients per visit, with 60% to 85% return patients. On average, 3 student interns and 2 student assistants attended each visit, supervised by a doctor of chiropractic faculty member and the program director. Most commonly, interns treated 8 patients during the 4- to 5-hour visits. Patient concerns included musculoskeletal problems and other health conditions commonly seen at chiropractic offices and teaching clinics. Interns also regularly saw chronic health problems exacerbated by poor living conditions, violence, limited access to health care, low educational attainment, chronic stress, and the extreme biomechanical loading resulting from heavy labor. Interview results yielded 4 themes: learning, attitudes, challenges, and program strengths. Interviewees described opportunities to learn while working with a marginalized population and discussed long-term effects on their postgraduation practice as chiropractors. Patients' physical, mental health, and psychosocial issues illustrated unique circumstances and profound needs of the underserved population being cared for by STA volunteers. Our findings may provide guidance for other community-based chiropractic service-learning programs in marginalized and underserved communities.

Uber as for-Profit Hiring Hall: A Price-Fixing Paradox and Its Implications

Uber poses a consistency problem for antitrust. In certain high-profile legal conflicts over its business model, Uber aims to have it both ways, maintaining that it is entitled to engage in price coordination of ride services but that Uber drivers may not coordinate with each other in their bargains with Uber. Meyer v. Kalanick and Chamber of Commerce v. City of Seattle, two currently pending antitrust lawsuits, expose a position to which Uber is committed and which, more importantly, is implicit in status quo regulation of Uber: that Uber is entitled to benefit from a price premium resulting from price coordination in ride services while drivers are barred from doing so. The labor exemption from antitrust law traditionally functioned to distribute such a premium from coordination, and it still does so where services are performed within the bounds of the employment relationship. As the labor exemption recedes, Uber dramatizes a more general regulatory tension by pressing the implications of the exemption’s absence against drivers’ coordination, while seeking to protect its own price-coordination activity. In developing this argument, I offer a model for understanding Uber’s activity that differs from -- or at least, does not require -- a position often taken by worker advocates, that Uber is selling ride services and is legally the employer of Uber drivers. By crediting and giving flesh to Uber’s own self-conception, we arrive at a fruitful analogy: the hiring hall. This foil illustrates both the regulatory inconsistency and some ways to resolve it.

Uber as For-Profit Hiring Hall: A Price-Fixing Paradox and its Implications

Uber poses a consistency problem for antitrust. In certain high-profile legal conflicts over its business model, Uber aims to have it both ways, maintaining that it is entitled to engage in price coordination of ride services but that Uber drivers may not coordinate with each other in their bargains with Uber. Meyer v. Kalanick and Chamber of Commerce v. City of Seattle, two currently pending antitrust lawsuits, expose a position to which Uber is committed and which, more importantly, is implicit in status quo regulation of Uber: that Uber is entitled to benefit from a price premium resulting from price coordination in ride services while drivers are barred from doing so. The labor exemption from antitrust law traditionally functioned to distribute such a premium from coordination, and it still does so where services are performed within the bounds of the employment relationship. As the labor exemption recedes, Uber dramatizes a more general regulatory tension by pressing the implications of the exemption’s absence against drivers’ coordination, while seeking to protect its own price-coordination activity. In developing this argument, I offer a model for understanding Uber’s activity that differs from -- or at least, does not require -- a position often taken by worker advocates, that Uber is selling ride services and is legally the employer of Uber drivers. By crediting and giving flesh to Uber’s own self-conception, we arrive at a fruitful analogy: the hiring hall. This foil illustrates both the regulatory inconsistency and some ways to resolve it.

DO UNIONS IMPACT EFFICIENCY?: EVIDENCE FROM THE U.S. MANUFACTURING SECTOR

I. INTRODUCTION The relationship between labor unions and firm performance has garnered a vast amount of attention from scholars, unions, and businesses, as well as from policymakers as extensive studies have explored both the theoretical foundations and the empirical evidence regarding the impact of labor unions on productivity, as well as on other aspects of business, such as sales, profitability, investment, and employment growth (Doucouliagos and Laroche 2003). Perhaps one of the most relevant public policy questions is how unions affect productivity. Although studies have empirically investigated union productivity effects for a variety of industries and public sectors, particularly in the U.S. and European countries, empirical evidence on this question, however, is mixed. Brown and Medoff (1978) and Freeman and Medoff (1984), in their early and influential work, argued that labor unions can raise productivity by inducing managers to adopt more efficient production methods and policies, and by providing better communication channels between workers and management. Supporting this impression, Dworkin and Ahlburg (1985) argued that opening communication channels between management and workers can result in integrative, rather than distributive, bargaining. Allen (1984) used the example of the construction industry, and cited union hiring halls, apprenticeship programs, and managerial shock effects as the reasons for union productivity improvements. In recent years, many employers have adopted new ways of organizing work that emphasize employee involvement. Empirical evidence suggests that various human resources management practices have a positive impact on firms' productivity. Black and Lynch (2001) found that unionized plants with these new approaches to organizing work had higher productivity than other similar non-union plants. Recent studies indicate that improved productivity of firms with labor unions may reflect better human resources management practices (Bloom and Van Reenen 2007; Doucouliagos and Laroche 2006; Ichniowski and Shaw 2003; Machin and Wood 2005). However, Lewis (1963) pointed out that one of the most well-established impacts of labor unions on firms is the ability to raise wages above competitive levels. Such a monopoly power may exert adverse impacts on firm productivity by distorting the labor market. Other unfavorable effects of unions are on RD Hirsch and Link 1987; Link and Siegel 2002; Lommerud, Meland, and Straume 2006; Menezes-Filho and Van Reenen 2003). These effects can have a detrimental impact on the dynamic productivity of firms. Thus, unions can both enhance and detract from firms' productivity performance. Because of the ambiguity over the net effect of unions, an assessment of the union's effects on economic performance hinges on empirical evidence (Doucouliagos and Laroche 2003). (1) Although most literature focuses on the performance or productivity impacts of unions, a strand of literature also looks at the channels through which unions affect measured performance/productivity. Measured productivity can be decomposed into two important components: the adopted production technologies and the of utilizing the technology. The former represents a shift in the production function and the latter shows the distance between actual production level and frontier production level for given inputs. An increase in the measured productivity may result if a firm adopts a better production technology or improves technical efficiency by moving production toward the frontier level of a given technology. The arguments for or against unions regarding productivity can trace their causes to the impacts on one or both of the productivity components. For instance, the communication effect of Brown and Medoff (1978) and Freeman and Medoff (1984) results in improved in using installed technology, whereas the outcome of changing production methods, also mentioned by the same authors, amounts to choosing new production technologies. …

Grounding the Regime of Precarious Employment

This ethnography of day laboring contends that to better understand how the labor process situated within the industry is regulated at the micro-level, it is necessary to move beyond studies that limit their analyses of homeless day laborers—an important subset of workers who mediate and respond to this low-road industry's bottom line imperatives—to worker grievances or the strategies they use to combat anonymity. This article shows that the reasons homeless workers see day labor as a “sensible” income-generating strategy and the ways in which they comprehend and negotiate the job queue—the central, supply-side regulatory mechanism with which they contend each day—illuminate both the ways in which they coproduce the regime of workplace discipline that regulates the temporary-labor process and contribute to the reproduction of the industry's micro-foundations. By extending the concept of “reliable contingency” to include these supply-side processes, this analysis reveals that agency loyalty is produced by a divide-and-rule dynamic that emerges from and acts back on these interpretive and interactional dynamics, creating an informal regulatory structure embedded in the hiring hall.

Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History (review)

Reviewed by: Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History Marcus Widenor Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History. By Grace Palladino. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 274 pp. $36 hardcover. This book will be a sobering read for labor educators attempting to navigate the current drift of the American labor movement. At the center of the author's narrative is the intractable decentralization of power within the building trades labor movement—an issue at the heart of the current rift between the AFL-CIO leadership and the Change to Win coalition. For the construction unions, the lack of a unified strategy produced a century of jurisdictional strife and left them seriously compromised when employers and their political allies went on the offensive in the early 1970s. Palladino offers a history, not of individual building trades unions, or of the unique work culture of construction. Instead she gives an account of the AFL's Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), which sought to build solidarity and resolve disputes between the nearly twenty trades that constituted it when it was first founded in 1908. This appears to be an "official history," but like Palladino's excellent volume on the IBEW (Dreams of Dignity, Workers of Vision, 1991), it gives us the story, warts and all. Building trades unions have faced a historical paradox in the use of their economic power. On the one hand they exercised remarkable control over local labor markets, through apprenticeship and the hiring hall. But this power also resulted in vicious competition between the trades for work during recessionary periods. This battle became even more complex in the post WWII era, when pre-fabrication, new materials and the challenge of non-union, multi-craft workers transformed the industry. The historical vestiges of craft autonomy created an insular union culture, jealous of craft jurisdiction, wary of bringing in new members, and at its worst, overtly racist. None of these characteristics served the unions well in combating the reinvigorated open [End Page 119] shop movement launched by the contractors in the 1960s. While the author's account of the first half century of the BCTD's work may seem arcane to the present day reader, her chronicling of the last forty years gives us a useful glimpse into the dilemma unions face when making strategic decisions. It is easy to forget that the recent attacks on labor commenced not with the PATCO strike, but with the Business Roundtable and Nixon administration led campaigns in the early 1970s. Palladino's account builds on Marc Linder's Wars of Attrition (2000), which analyzed the relationship between the Business Roundtable's attempt to contain building trades wages, the struggles to desegregate the construction unions, and Nixon's co-optation of building trades support for the Vietnam War. She uses interviews and documentation from contemporary BCTD leaders and insiders to supplement this. The recent debates over the COMET organizing program, the Building Trades Organizing Project and political infighting at the BCTD are well documented in the book, giving the reader a sense of the complexity of the problems, and the inertia of the organizations as they seek to define a unified organizing strategy. This book does not attempt to be a comprehensive history of the building trades. Focusing as it does on the BCTD, there are important areas the book does not cover in detail. The central premises of the building trades institutional power—in the establishment of apprenticeship programs, in control of the hiring hall, and in the trades' development of relations with multi-employer associations—are noted, but not analyzed in depth. Important landmarks in building trades history, like the passage of the Davis Bacon Act in 1931, are sometimes noted in passing. Most importantly, I think a more in-depth analysis of the issue of racial exclusion is necessary to put the modern era in critical perspective. Whatever its limitations, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits does give us a valuable institutional look at the strengths and limitations of craft union autonomy. From a contemporary perspective it is a look at the real problems inherent in "changing to organize," a slogan clearly identified with the current...

The contemporary industrial relations system in construction: analysis, observations and speculations

The construction industry experienced deep transformations coinciding with its three-decade decline in unionization from the 1970s to the present. Several factors shaping its industrial relations system have changed so fundamentally that it would be extremely difficult to recreate the workplace rules and governance mechanisms (e.g. apprentice systems; hiring halls; multi-employer funds) long associated with the industry. This essay provides a prospective look at the construction industry by examining the transformation it has undergone over the past thirty years. I focus on changes in the management of construction projects, the operation of public and private construction markets, and the structure of employer and labor institutions and assess how they affect worker–management relations prospectively. The article also discusses where these dramatic shifts have left us with large holes in our understanding of the current and future characteristics of the construction workplace.

REGULATING THE EMPLOYMENT SHARKS: RECONCEPTUALIZING THE LEGAL STATUS OF THE COMMERCIAL TEMP AGENCY

This article presents a historical and legal argument for reclassifying and regulating commercial staffing agencies as labor market intermediaries. Their current legal classification as employers is a major factor contributing to the exploitation of temps. The article contrasts the deregulated environment for commercial staffing agencies with the extensive federal regulation of union hiring halls. Because these two institutions serve a similar function—providing access to the job market for short‐term employees—both should be subject to comparable regulatory regimes in order to restore parity in the legal treatment of temporary employees by all parties to the employment relationship. A regulatory regime should impose on temporary help and staffing agencies a level of transparency and fiduciary obligations analogous to the duty of fair representation imposed on union hiring halls by federal labor law. Absent such legal reclassification, the staffing industry will remain unfairly privileged in the marketplace in a way that prevents fair treatment and representation for temps.

Constructing a Radical Identity:History, Memory, and the Seafaring Stories of Harry Bridges

From 1934 onward Harry Bridges personiÞed militant, left-wing unionism on the Pacific Coast. Born Alfred Renton Bridges in 1901 in Australia, he began calling himself Harry when he went to sea at age sixteen. By 1922 he was working on the San Francisco docks as a longshoreman. In 1933 the International LongshoremenOs Association (ILA) chartered Local 38Ð79 in San Francisco, and Bridges emerged as leader of its left-wing caucus. In May 1934 ILA members went on strike from Bellingham, Washington, to San Diego, California, in an effort to secure union recognition, a union hiring hall, and improvements in wages and hours. Bridges became a leadingNand uncompromisingNÞgure in the strike. After the strike, he won the presidency of Local 38-79 and then of the ILAOs Pacific Coast

“Boston Harbor”-type project labor agreements in construction: Nature, rationales, and legal challenges

This article examines union action to gain jobs by inducing state and municipal governmental bodies, and most recently, the federal government as well, to direct that all work on a tax-financed construction project must be performed under the terms of a pre-hire project labor agreement ("PLA"). The effect is to freeze out nonunion ("open-shop") contractors and their employees unless such contractors are willing to sign, or at least adhere to, the labor agreement, recruit employees from the union hiring halls, or have their employees join or pay fees to the union.

American Labor in the Era of World War II.

Acknowledgments Introduction by Sally M. Miller and Daniel A. Cornford Labor in the National Arena CIO Leaders and the State, 1935-1955 by Robert H. Zieger The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Regulations by James A. Atleson The United Steelworkers of America and Health Insurance, 1937-1962 by Alan Derickson Struggles at the Workplace Wartime Shipyards: The Transformation of Labor in San Francisco's East Bay by Marilynn S. Johnson The San Francisco Machinists and the National War Labor Board by Richard P. Boyden Who Controls the Hiring Hall? The Struggle for Job Control in the ILWU during World War II by Nancy L. Quam-Wickham Race, Gender, and Community Her Husband Didn't Have a Word to Say: Black Women and Blues Clubs in Richmond, California During World War II by Shirley Ann Moore African-American Migrant Women in the San Francisco East Bay Area by Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo Catalyst for Change: Wartime Housing and African Americans in California's East Bay by Delores Nason McBroome The CIO: A Vanguard for Civil Rights in Southern California, 1940-1946 by David Oberweiser, Jr. Index

Two Ages of Waterfront Labour

THERE ARE TWO crucial watersheds in the modem history of waterfront labour (1) the successful struggle, beginning with the Pacific Coast revolts of the 1930s, to set-up union-dominated hiring halls; and (2) the technological revolution in cargo handling and ship design associated with the introduction of containers in the 1960s and 70s. Bruce Nelson's historical treatment of waterfront labour focuses on the first of these watersheds, with particular emphasis on the interactions between seamen and longshoremen during the syndicalist renaissance'' of the late 1930s. William Finlay's sociological study is concerned with the effects of the second watershed—the technological revolution in cargo handling—on skill levels, job control and status hierarchies within die longshore labour process. A good sense of the dramatically different emphases of these books can be derived by comparing their dustjackets. The cover of the Nelson study shows a photograph of a march by picketing San Francisco longshoremen, during the first week of die legendary 1934 strike. Overlaid on this are photographs of two former Aussies who had a large impact on the US waterfront struggles of the 1930s: Harry Bridges, who was to become the dominant figure in the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), and Harry Hynes, a rankand-file leader of the Communist-led Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU)

Work, Family, and Class Values in the Nineteenth Century: Colloquium on Denis Poulot's Le Sublime

Denis Poulot (b. 1832) was worker who became small-time employer in the Parisian metal trades. His Le Sublime, ou le travailleur comment il est en 1870 et ce qu'il peut ?tre offers remarkable insights into the lives, labor, and families of his former comrades. Considered classic by social and labor historians, Le Sub lime has recently been republished by Editions Maspero with an introduction by Alain Cottereau. This new edition served as the basis of discussion at one-day colloquium in New Haven on March 27, 1981 sponsored by the Council on West European Studies and the Department of History at Yale University. The partici pants included France specialists as well as historians of other European countries and the United States. The gathering signified the increasing interest of students of nineteenth century workers' movements in the world of the mid-century middle class and its relationship to working class experience. Christopher Johnson began the morning session with remarks on Poulot's manipulation of the artisan ideologies of the eighteen forties in Le Sublime. Johnson demonstrated how Poulot reoriented artisan ideology away from its origi nal cooperative, fraternal mold and set it in competitive one while retaining al most all the old panaceas: political democracy, generalized primary education fol lowed by solid vocational training in state-financed schools, chambres syndicales, organized hiring practices through craft-run hiring halls, the institutions and values of the compagnonnages, reformed Conseils des Prudhommes, and the linchpin, cooperation of production financed by cooperative banques du travail. Johnson went on to suggest that Poulot presented a remarkably coherent progressive capi talist program for what John Foster calls 'liberalization,' and concluded by questioning the extent to which Poulot's ideology of management had triumphed in France in this period.

Origin of the Hiring Hall in Construction

Origin of the Hiring Hall in Construction

The Development and Current Status of the Law Pertaining to Hiring Hall Arrangements

The Development and Current Status of the Law Pertaining to Hiring Hall Arrangements

Unqualified Hiring Hall Contract Constitutes Per Se Discrimination: Labor Law. Labor-Management Relations Act. Employment. Construction Industry Hiring Halls

Unqualified Hiring Hall Contract Constitutes Per Se Discrimination: Labor Law. Labor-Management Relations Act. Employment. Construction Industry Hiring Halls

Shape-Up and Hiring Hall.

Shape-Up and Hiring Hall.

Review: Shape-up and Hiring Hall

Review: Shape-up and Hiring Hall

Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods and Labor Relations on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts.

Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods and Labor Relations on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts.

Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts

Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts