Labour Coalition Research Articles

How Work Becomes Invisible: The Erosion of the Wage Floor for Workers with Disabilities

How does work come to be constructed as a service to the worker? In the United States, the payment of subminimum wages to disabled workers has been legal since 1938 and was entrenched by 1986 legislation eliminating the previously mandated floor of 50 percent of the minimum wage. This article draws on primary historical materials to explain the passage of these amendments, which I analyze as a case of delaborization, a process through which work is mystified as such and reclassified as something else (e.g., service). I find that the managers of segregated workshops for disabled manual laborers rose to control disability employment policy in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization. Professionals mobilized disability stigma to frame the subminimum wage as a social welfare issue subject to their expertise and to lobby successfully for its entrenchment. Weaknesses in the disability–labor coalition enabled this seizure of jurisdiction. This research illuminates professional expertise, the withdrawal of labor unions, and identity-based stigma as major mechanisms driving delaborization, an important contemporary influence on the organization of work. The case of the subminimum wage thus develops sociological literatures on labor, disability, and politics.

A New Contract? The Joint Mobilization of Unionized and Contract Workers in Latin America

ABSTRACTComparative political economists often divide Latin American labor markets into those with secure employment (insiders) and those without it (outsiders). Yet this division misses an increasingly important class of contract workers, who hold formal labor contracts but often lack labor stability, welfare benefits, and organizing rights. When do unionized and contract workers share preferences and engage in joint organizing? And when do their efforts result in policy change? Drawing on case studies of Chile and Peru, I argue that unionized workers mobilize contract workers when they see their own membership under threat and when they share physical workplaces with contractors. Labor coalitions succeed in policy reform when they leverage divisions within the business community and upcoming elections to build support. This article thus pushes scholars to move beyond dichotomies of formal versus informal workers and study how contract workers matter for collective action and labor policy outcomes.

Cultural Political Economy and Conflicts Law – A new way to approach the Eurozone crisis

The immediate effects of the Euro crisis have been tamed but the crisis has soured the relations between Southern and Northern Member states for many years to come. Comparative political economy explains the frictions between North and South as a result of different institutional configurations of national economies (Varieties of Capitalism), different interests of capital and labor coalitions (growth model perspective) or ideational traditions (ordoliberal vs dirigisme). We argue that the exclusive focus of these approaches on either, rational institutionalism, interest coalitions or economic ideas obscures that these three factors come together in a long-term evolutionary trajectory that has formed national economic cultures within the Eurozone since the 1950s. We examplify our cultural political economy approach showing empircally how the German and Italian political economies developed in different ways since the end of WWII. In the second part of our contribution we develop a conflicts law perspective offering it as a third way that can mediate between the two extreme positions of Wolfgang Streeck (back to the nation state) and Juergen Habermas (federation) in the debate on the future of the European Union. We show how the culturally grounded diversities of European capitalisms can be accommodated through a conflicts law.

“Low Fences”: Reflections on Intimacy across Scales

ABSTRACT This short reflection on “intimacy” considers the cross-ethnic labor coalitions at the CPC plantation camp in Wahiawa O’ahu to thread conversations about solidarity together with theorizations of intimacy. Whereas Euro-American notions of modernity as demonstrating dominion over nature and alienation from labor rely on conquest and environmental degradation, relational epistemology belies the framework of possession by understanding nature and the human as fundamentally interconnected rather than in contention with one another. Intimacy as relation upends intimacy as (self-)possession, and in so doing, it facilitates affinity and solidarity across differences rather than producing the coercive intimacy of appropriation and domination.

Spontaneity, Coalition Structure, and Strategic Choice

Following the Great Recession, austerity programs and restrictions on the public sector were introduced worldwide. In this article, I ask how and why labor coalitions in two states used differing organizational structures to respond to “shock politics” that severely restricted public-sector unions in 2011. I find the availability or lack of a citizen-initiated veto referendum shaped but did not completely explain differences in strategic choices between unions in Wisconsin and Ohio. Rather, tensions among allies and lack of time for strategic planning also contributed to a nonhierarchical coalition in Wisconsin, while Ohio unions had ample time to create a bureaucratic coalition and plan a successful veto referendum campaign. I argue that given sufficient time to respond to political threats, hierarchical organizations can promote efficient, effective deployment of some political tactics.

SNP – labour coalition: a dream or a reality?

SNP – labour coalition: a dream or a reality?

Social and Political Drivers of the Reorientation of U.S. Trade Policy: The Case of U.S. Withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Previous sociological studies demonstrated that U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) had durable political power to motivate U.S. trade policy. However, why did the United States switch from a “free trade” to an “America First” trade agenda? Economists and political scientists argue that protectionist voters elected the protectionist candidate—Trump. An alternative sociological explanation is that U.S. MNCs lost political power to competing stakeholder groups. The article uses qualitative and quantitative methods to test these competing theories using the case study of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The article argues that both theories are necessary, and neither are sufficient. The United States withdrew from the TPP because increasing negative effects of trade and investment in the United States reshaped trade politics, especially on the republican side; however, power relations between stakeholder groups had to shift as well. U.S. MNCs lost political influence over trade policy to new domestic manufacturing organizations and their networks with labor and fair trade coalitions.

The Netherlands: Political development and data for 2017

The year 2017 was a period of contradictionary development in terms of political stability in the Netherlands. On te one hand, the Mark Rutte II cabinet, the longest serving cabinet since the Second World War, was the first since 1998 to complete the entire term. On the other hand, the highly volatile 2017 national elections yielded the most fractionalized parliament in Dutch history. The ensuing cabinet formation was the longest on to date.

Fortune favors the organized: How Chicago activists won equity goals under austerity

ABSTRACTWhat explains the recent success of municipal minimum wages and other city-level distributive economic reforms? Noting the emergence of income inequality as a political issue, scholars and media accounts attribute success to the current political focus on inequality. But such a perspective neglects the classic question of how windows of political opportunity generate actual reform. Drawing on fieldwork with community–labor advocacy organizations in Chicago, we argue that maturing community–labor coalitions have developed a strategic repertoire capable of converting political opportunity into policy victories. First, activists have developed nationally networked policy communities that supply ready-made answers to the political problem of inequality. Second, these activists have developed a range of techniques to make interorganizational collaboration and shared political advocacy more effective. Third, community organizations and local labor unions have embraced long-term political change over incremental goals obtainable in the short term. These changes help to explain the successful passage of distributive economic reforms and will likely outlast the current political focus on inequality.

Organizing The Ordinary City: How Labor Reform Strategies Travel to the US Heartland

AbstractIn New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing campaigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community–labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community–labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing low‐wage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole.

The Rise of Wage Theft Laws

Seeking regulatory power unavailable at the urban scale, community–labor coalitions have persuaded dozens of state legislatures to enact legislation addressing the problem of wage theft in low-wage service industries. The project of wage theft reform raises important questions about whether urban coalitions can effectively pursue their advocacy goals in State Houses. Drawing on an inventory of 255 wage theft laws proposed between 2004 and 2012, we evaluate three rival explanations of why wage theft legislation succeeds: worker grievances, political conditions, and movement strength. We find that states with larger numbers of worker centers and higher union density are more likely to both propose and enact wage theft legislation. Our results also suggest that urban reform movements maintain greater power to set legislative agendas than they do to ensure the passage of proposed laws. This suggest that “new labor” actors have developed state-level political power that warrants further scrutiny and explanation.

“Workers Housing Saadiyat Island: Guggenheim Museum Souvenir” (2013)

November 01 2018 “Workers Housing Saadiyat Island: Guggenheim Museum Souvenir” (2013) Gregory Sholette, Gregory Sholette Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/d), REPOhistory, and Gulf Labor Coalition. His publications include It’s The Political Economy, Stupid co-edited with Oliver Ressler, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture, both Pluto Press UK. Recent installations include Imaginary Archive at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and Zeppelin University, Germany, as well as the Precarious Workers Pageant in Venice, Italy. Sholette is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Theory, Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate school of Design Harvard University, as well as Associate Professor in the Queens College Art Department, City University of New York where he helped establish the new MFA Concentration SPQ (Social Practice Queens). https://www.tumblr.com/blog/gregsholette. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Matt Greco Matt Greco Matt Greco is a sculptor, photographer and designer living and working in Queens NY. He received his BFA from Armstrong Atlantic University and his MFA from Queens College CUNY. His work has been exhibited internationally and domestically including the Telfair Museum of Art (GA), Desoto Row Gallery (GA), the Dorsky Gallery (NY), the NY Studio Gallery (NY), Gallery 126 (Ireland), the Beacon Gallery (CA), the Baron Gallery (OH), and the Kurbas Center (Ukraine). He is an adjunct professor of art at Queens College CUNY and is the founder and director of the Digital Imaging Laboratory there. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Gregory Sholette Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/d), REPOhistory, and Gulf Labor Coalition. His publications include It’s The Political Economy, Stupid co-edited with Oliver Ressler, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture, both Pluto Press UK. Recent installations include Imaginary Archive at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and Zeppelin University, Germany, as well as the Precarious Workers Pageant in Venice, Italy. Sholette is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Theory, Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate school of Design Harvard University, as well as Associate Professor in the Queens College Art Department, City University of New York where he helped establish the new MFA Concentration SPQ (Social Practice Queens). https://www.tumblr.com/blog/gregsholette. Matt Greco Matt Greco is a sculptor, photographer and designer living and working in Queens NY. He received his BFA from Armstrong Atlantic University and his MFA from Queens College CUNY. His work has been exhibited internationally and domestically including the Telfair Museum of Art (GA), Desoto Row Gallery (GA), the Dorsky Gallery (NY), the NY Studio Gallery (NY), Gallery 126 (Ireland), the Beacon Gallery (CA), the Baron Gallery (OH), and the Kurbas Center (Ukraine). He is an adjunct professor of art at Queens College CUNY and is the founder and director of the Digital Imaging Laboratory there. Online Issn: 2572-7338 Print Issn: 1091-711X © 2016 Gregory Sholette and Matt Greco2016Gregory Sholette and Matt Greco Thresholds (2016) (44): 185–190. https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00124 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Gregory Sholette, Matt Greco; “Workers Housing Saadiyat Island: Guggenheim Museum Souvenir” (2013). Thresholds 2016; (44): 185–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00124 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThresholds Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Gregory Sholette and Matt Greco2016Gregory Sholette and Matt Greco Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Equity Planning Outside City Hall

Focusing on progressive economic development policy and the institutional form of the community–labor coalition—an alliance between labor unions and urban advocacy organizations—this article assesses the potential to scale equity planning “up” to political scales at which redistributive policy is both more effective and more likely to be enacted. I investigate when and why scaling up works through a comparison of two differently scaled campaigns to raise wages in Chicago’s service industries. The results indicate that equity planners in City Hall can expand their ability to address structural economic problems by allying with nationally organized activist organizations.

“I Grew Up a Working-Class Evangelical”

This article explores three ways intersubjectivity is implicated in an ethnography of the lived experience of members of an interfaith and labor coalition. First challenging dualistic thinking and the strict application of typologies, I emphasize the importance of understanding faith practices through the study of lived experience. When one studies lived experience, several layers of intersubjectivity are at play. Because I grew up in a religious, working-class family, aspects of my life now serve as cultural capital in understanding the daily challenges of coalition participants who redefine the institutional boundaries between religion and work. Furthermore, field interactions between the researcher and participants affect members’ explanations of their activism. Finally, the life of the ethnographer is affected by the overall experience of fieldwork.

New Worlds and Old Prejudices: Australia, Cricket and the Subcontinent: 1880–1960

Until recently, Australia's cricketing past has been coloured by an anglocentric bias. Australian cricket writers, players and administrators mainly have deemed Australian series with subcontinental countries of much lesser importance than Ashes contests. In surveying Australia's cricketing relations with the subcontinent from the 1880s until Australia's first fully fledged official tour of the region in 1959–1960, this paper seeks to redress this imbalance. The paper explores how initial cricketing relations were viewed within the prism of Australia's traditional cricketing ties with England. This did not alter with India's attaining official Test match status in the 1930s. Australian tours of India were confined to unofficial teams, and it was not until 1947–1948 that the first official exchange occurred. As this paper documents, the importance of subcontinental cricket tours increased after the war, as both Labor and Liberal Coalition governments encouraged the use of cricket to foster diplomatic ties at a time of increasing decolonisation and when Indian and Australian external relations were ideologically opposed. The governments' efforts were not fully supported by many Australian cricketers and administrators. While some, such as the Australian captain Ian Johnson, embraced cricketing diplomacy, many of his colleagues coloured these new cricketing worlds with old Australian prejudices.

Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction by John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov (review)

Reviewed by: Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction by John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov Theodore J. Karamanski (bio) Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 310. Cloth, $55.00.) During the last twenty years the boundaries of Reconstruction-era historiography have expanded well beyond the states of the defeated Confederacy. This change has flowed from the recognition that federal policies in the South were inexorably linked to political support in the North and the realization that the trauma of Civil War had repercussions throughout American culture and society. As a result, the cast of characters in the Reconstruction drama has expanded greatly from the familiar struggling black freedpeople and resistant white landowners to include Indians battling reservation confinement, grasping urban industrialists, beleaguered western farmers, and an urban working class trying to adjust to the revolutionary changes the Civil War brought to the American economy. It is to this latter group that John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov turn their attention in a detailed local study that adds much nuance to our understanding of the Reconstruction era in the urban North. The Civil War dramatically affected Chicago. Although it was located far from the battle lines, the city, which was already a leading commercial center, was transformed by the war into an industrial powerhouse. During the decade of the 1860s the city population more than doubled and the number of factories tripled. The famous Union Stock Yards were opened and Chicago foundries rolled the first steel rail made in the United States. Production for the operation and expansion of the nation’s growing railroad network played a large role in the transformation of the city’s economy and the experience of work in Chicago. At the heart of Jentz and Schneirov’s study is the story of how workers and capitalists struggled to adjust their actions and ideology to the conditions of an industrial workplace that became by necessity larger and more impersonal. The authors focus on what they call the “wage-labor question” from the late 1850s through the 1870s. They contend that the Emancipation Proclamation sparked a shift in working-class political alignments in Chicago. The old “free (white) labor” ideology lost relevance once slavery was to be ended and the workplace industrialized. Jentz and Schneirov argue that a new labor coalition emerged, made up of former Democratic Irish, Republican German, and Anglo-American workers united under an ideology they call “transnational social republicanism” (4). For a time the alliance identified with the liberalism of the Republican Party, but this political association began to erode with the 1867 strike for [End Page 425] an eight-hour workday and the rise of the probusiness stalwarts in party circles. However, it was the depression that began in 1873 and continued until 1878 that caused the complete defection of northern labor from the Republican coalition. In this finding Jentz and Schneirov disagree with historian David Montgomery’s pathbreaking argument in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) and support the broad analysis of northern labor offered by Eric Foner in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Jentz and Schneirov do not confine their study of the rise of class consciousness in Chicago to the working class. Their narrative follows Chicago’s burgeoning capitalists down a parallel track. Local events like the Great Fire of 1871 and a second major fire in 1874 combined with the 1873 panic to raise the specter of severe social disorder on the scale of the Paris Commune. Fear drove business competitors together to form the Citizens Association, which attempted to use the organs of municipal power to protect property and coerce the working class into order. Nonetheless, it is clear that the authors’ real interest is with the story of working-class politics. Their study does not detail the regional and national social, financial, or organizational networks that undergirded the rise of industry in Chicago. That subject remains largely unexplored for nineteenth-century Chicago. Jentz and Schneirov have...

Redefining the Irish Presidency: The Politics of a ‘Non-political’ Office, 1973–1990

This article examines the presidencies of Erskine Childers, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh and Patrick Hillery during the period 1973–1990. Each of the presidential terms is examined in terms of the background of the incumbent, the circumstances of his nomination as president and his role in office. Commencing with the election of Erskine Childers, the role assumed a higher public profile, with national engagements and international travel, and this activity has become a defining feature of all subsequent presidencies. Nonetheless, each of the presidents covered in this article adopted a narrow interpretation of the role, sought to avoid conflict with the government of the day and was strongly guided by governmental definition of the role and its powers. Moreover, during the term of the Fine Gael–Labour coalition led by Liam Cosgrave (1973–1977) evidence was found of uncomfortable cohabitation between presidents and an administration from different political traditions, leading in one case to a presidential resignation, although cohabitation appears not to have been an issue during the later coalition led by Garret FitzGerald.

Matilda Tone in America: Exile, Gender, and Memory in the Making of Irish Republican Nationalism

On October 8,1996, small gathering organized by the Irish-American Labor Coalition took place in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery to honor long-dead Irish republican named Matilda Tone. Though wind and rain marred the occa sion, several dozen people looked on as Mary Robinson, president of the Repub lic of Ireland, unveiled painstakingly restored headstone marking Tones grave and eulogized her for her efforts to lead Ireland toward nonsectarian, demo cratic and inclusive politics.1 Referring to the dedication of statues of Eleanor Roosevelt and the jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald had occurred just days earlier, the Irish president observed it was a good week for women in New York City.2 Despite the valiant efforts of Robinson and the Irish-American Labor Coali tion, however, the critically important contribution of Matilda Tone to the making of Irish republican nationalism remains largely unknown. Though dis cussed in biographies of her husband, the United Irishman Theobald Wolfe Tone, and in an important essay by Nancy J. Curtin, Matilda Tone's name does not appear in any of the general histories of Irish nationalism.3 Nor do other Irish republican women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries receive much attention in such works. The still prevalent historical mindset, as Mary Cullen has put it, that sees males as the active agents of change in human history and females almost solely in support and follower roles is

Gender, Labor and Progressive Coalitions Working the Vote: Grass Roots Mobilizations for Registration & Early Voting in the 2008 Election

Women’s movement organizations were central to the increased voter turnout in the 2008 United States elections. Based on fieldwork in Washington, D.C., we analyze the GOTV (Get Out the Vote) strategies of gendered interests in the 2008 election. Our work adds to the literature on social movements and political action, the strengths and weaknesses of coalitions, the official, overt and formal as well as from within efforts to incorporate gendered interests and agendas into political parties and institutions.

Unhealthy Partnerships: The Tobacco Industry and African American and Latino Labor Organizations

The tobacco industry in the 1980s began to form relationships with outside groups for assistance on key policy issues due to its own poor credibility in the policy arena. This strategy allowed the industry to advance its own interests while seeming to match the agendas of very different organizations. Between 1988 and 1998, the tobacco industry developed coalitions with the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), representing African American trade unionists, and the Labor Coalition on Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), representing Latino trade unionists. APRI and LCLAA each adopted resolutions supporting industry positions on smokefree worksites and excise taxes, issues on which they had not previously taken positions, and promoted these positions to their members, political leaders and the public. They also supported the industry's youth programs. This research relied upon a review of background literature and document searches through the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and Tobacco Documents Online to examine the development of the excise tax coalition. The tobacco industry built support with APRI and LCLAA by framing policy positions in line with the organizations' interests, creating institutional arrangements that circumvented direct funding from the industry, and enhancing the industry's ability to influence excise tax debates indirectly. Although tobacco control advocates do not have the financial resources of the tobacco industry at their disposal, they can learn from tobacco industry techniques as they seek to build coalitions with people of color in the labor movement. Tobacco control advocates can both counter tobacco industry issue frames and also align their interests with those of working people of color by working on other issues of interest to this population, including health care and worker health and safety.