Labor Agenda Research Articles

“Symbolism, Separatism, and Perpetual Guilt”: Politicians Debating the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, 1987–1990

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Aboriginal Affairs was a volatile portfolio. Gough Whitlam signalled a reorientation of policy with self‐determination in 1973. However, in the succeeding decade, policy slipped back to self‐management and self‐sufficiency that were the default of the Coalition. The proposals for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission by Labor in the late 1980s brought self‐determination back into the equation and sparked much heated debate. This article focusses on the parliamentary debates around Labor's proposed legislation to establish the Commission, between 1987 and November 1989, when the debates concluded and a severely reduced Act came into being. I argue that the Coalition's hostility to the proposal demonstrated an implacable resistance to self‐determination and an agenda that sought to derail its possibility. Furthermore, I argue that the resonances between arguments for and against an Indigenous voice then and now demonstrate the radical nature of Labor's agenda in the late 1980s and suggest that arguments against the Voice to Parliament now might be conceived as unfinished business by conservative Coalition forces.

Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II by Leon Fink

Recent history has not been kind to the American Left, as historians like Leon Fink, in Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II, have noted. In this book, focused mostly on liberal Democrats, Fink studies the vision of progressive internationalists seeking to forge a world of democracy, abundance, and liberty after World War II. As Fink convincingly argues, they came up short, their idealism dashed by Cold War realism and market conservatism. His is a sobering account, illuminated by case studies that explain how the aspirations of progressives were blocked by politics and diplomatic realities. It is well-known history; Fink sprinkles archival material with largely secondary source research. Yet the book contributes to scholarship because Fink injects class (a category now often passed over for race and gender), labor, social activists, and, indeed, racial movements into the story. Fink certainly understands, but rarely notes, that any success of liberalism after World War II arose because the dominant power, the United States, had shifted into a liberal era that endured into the 1970s. Today, we are shaped by the Reagan Revolution, although the cycle might be turning again after 40 years of neoconservatism that has been buffeted by nationalist populism and leftist critics of globalization. By the way, Fink provides only superficial definitions of liberalism, progressivism, something called “liberal-nationalism” (13), and neoliberalism. The book is also rather selective in its case studies. Why Israel and Costa Rica, but not Guatemala and Iran, both of which witnessed the heavy hand of the national security state at the expense of progressive values? And sometimes Fink is too glum; he does little, for example, with the ill-fated International Trade Organization of the late 1940s except to mention that it had a labor agenda, even though it represented a major first effort by the developing world to assert their interests.

La solidarité et ses limites: La CFDT et les travailleurs dans “les années 68”

La solidarité et ses limites: La CFDT et les travailleurs dans “les années 68”

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Advocacy Journalism, Labor Feminism, and the Timber Worker, 1936-1940

ABSTRACT Julia Bertram worked as a journalist for the Timber Worker, the newspaper of the International Woodworkers of America, from 1936–1940. For three of those years, she also served as the president of the women’s auxiliary of her local union. This study examines Bertram’s work in both of these roles as crucial to the union’s success, and argues that Bertram’s combination of union activism and journalism embedded working-class feminism within the developing progressive labor agenda represented by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. Bertram’s work offers an example of how working-class White and immigrant women shaped the labor movement prior to World War II by expanding the scope of appropriate political activities in which women participated. As a journalist for the Timber Worker, Bertram frequently reminded her readers that women were unionists and equal members of the working-class struggle. This combination of activism and journalism has been overlooked in discussions about the rise of labor feminism, which tend to focus on female-dominated industries and unions rather than on the press. Female journalists in the labor press and in union auxiliaries deserve more attention if historians hope to understand the rise of labor feminism in the 1930s, as women carved out space in the fledgling CIO and its unions.

What Is “Labor” About Labor State Governments In Australia?

What Is “Labor” About Labor State Governments In Australia?

Collaborating to Inform a Progressive Labor Agenda

Collaborating to Inform a Progressive Labor Agenda

UNIONS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: PATHWAYS TO GLOBAL LABOR ENVIRONMENTALISM

During the last two decades labor unions at the national, regional, and global levels have developed environmental agendas that add to their long‐standing and well‐justified concerns with occupational safety and health. Yet, it is also fair to say that the internalization of environmental priorities by the broader labor movement remains tentative and contested. The goal of this article is to address three challenges encountered on the road to global union environmentalism, in each case highlighting some promising initiatives undertaken by unions in response. These are the challenges of forming a global labor agenda on the environment, of strengthening the links and deliberations among unions, particularly those in the reconfigured core of the world political economy, and of moving away from business environmentalism and in the direction of social environmentalism.

In Defense of Soft Law and Public-Private Initiatives: A Means to an End? -- The Malaysian Case

This discussion offers a theoretical framework towards the discovery and amalgamation of conceptions within hard labor law and soft law initiatives which may spring from deliberately designed public-private initiatives as well as spontaneous market-driven responses. A case in defense of soft law is made for Malaysia on the basis of political realism. Agents of soft law initiatives are evaluated with a focus on public and private codes. I argue that for Malaysia, the stage is being set for divergent regulatory approaches to labor, with differing consequences and outcomes. Some of these outcomes, as will be illustrated, may not be consciously designed but are likely to occur spontaneously. The focus of the discussion will be on the changing nature of labor norms in individual employment law, the advent of human rights reasoning and the interdependence of the organic forces in a particular jurisdiction that drive the labor agenda. The discussion concludes with an argument in praise of soft law as a viable agent for driving change in hard labor law, whilst maintaining its soft law character, thus contributing to the varieties of hybrid labor regulation.

The ongoing legitimacy project: corporate philanthropy as protective strategy

AbstractCombining insights from institutional theory and resource dependence theory, this paper suggests that legitimacy is a scarce intangible resource that is always contested. Legitimacy, as a socially defined resource, represents relational power within a community. The various members of an organizational field, therefore, seek to gain, maintain, defend, and deny to others, access to the legitimacy resource. The author looks to the issue of healthcare‐related employment benefits, and notes that organizations deny such benefits in communities containing strong labor movements, substituting less expensive corporate philanthropic practices in order to demonstrate commitment to the social contract and norms of legitimacy while simultaneously denying the legitimacy of organized labor's agenda. In communities without strong labor movements, however, corporations are less encumbered in providing healthcare benefits because in such communities they do not need to work to deny the legitimacy of organized labor.

Technical innovations at the service of cheaper labor in pre‐industrial Europe. The Enlightened agenda to transform the gender division of labor in silk manufacturing

In 1749, Jacques de Vaucanson patented his or tour pour tirer la soie or spindle for silk reeling. Vaucanson's mechanized spindle soon was adopted by most silk producer regions in Europe, at a time when silk was a main luxury commodity in Western trade and manufacturing production. In this article I analyze the introduction of this innovation in Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century. I describe how the Enlightened reformist government promoted its adoption, the main advantage in relation to former spindles being that it could be handled by women, given that less physical effort was needed. Although supported by decades of political and financial support, the diffusion of the Vaucanson spindle was limited. Nevertheless, this case is interesting because it fitted perfectly with a central aspect of the labor agenda of Enlightened reformists: to increase women's labor force participation in order to reduce productive costs and make industry more competitive; and to permit men's labor to be ‘reallocated’ to agriculture, public works and the army. Technological innovation is thus analyzed as part of the economic and social agenda of the period.

What Makes for Effective Labor Representation on Pension Boards?

This article examines the efficacy of labor representation on pension boards. Using existing literature and interviews with labor trustees, this article develops a model where a more formal approach to recruitment and selection, skill acquisition, and accountability is hypothesized to aid labor trustees in achieving effective integration and representation on pension boards. Data indicate that labor trustees are placed in a challenging environment with insufficient support from their union, other trustees, or the board. These findings have important implications for the selection, training, and integration of labor trustees and the success of a labor agenda on pension issues.

Editor's Page

The world is a grim place these days, but here at home, in the months since November, our spirits have lifted a bit, and in this issue of Dissent we are able to publish a few hopeful articles. It's not that we have stopped worrying, but we worry now with a new sense of purpose. Studying the 2006 voting statistics, Ruy Teixeira manages to look forward to 2008. (Benjamin Ross expresses some skepticism, which our readers will expect.) And Nelson Lichtenstein and Jim McNeill, analyzing the state of the unions, can write about (what we call on the front cover) "labor's agenda"—as if there might really be an agenda and not just a wish list. How all this will play out over the next eighteen months is uncertain, but things are possible now that we hardly dreamed of two years ago. In the next Dissent , we will carry our first article in years on national health insurance.

Integración regional, democracia y relaciones laborales contractuales: un análisis desde la experiencia sudamericana

Labor relationships in the world today had change facing the unbalance of power between capital and labor. But labor didn’t stay merely quiet. A central aspect of labor responses are related with «regionalization» of unions, and the way they are linking them with global and national actions. The active participation of unions at the MERCOSUR and the Andean Community had renewed the labor agenda, the structures and the union cultures, developing new ways of organization and social dialogue between employers, workers and governments, changing even the structure of labor markets and the regional workforce.

Revisiting the critical moment of the Korean economy and labor market: From central control to liberalization

This paper, in face of the increasing interconnectivity between local and global, has attempted to retrospect the critical moment of Korean society under Tae‐woo Rho (1988–93) regime, in which Korea struggled for fundamental reforms of the earlier centrally controlled state system through economic rationalization and labor flexibilization. During that juncture of Korean history, neo‐liberalization under the influence of Fordian decline was a governing theme behind the Korean economy's policy formation as well as labor agenda. This reliance of government on the neo‐liberal pillar has made an impact on the subsequent leaderships under Young Sam Kim (1993–1998) and Dae Jung Kim (1998‐present). After briefly reviewing the major aspect of Korean economy and labor problems surrounding the financial crisis of East Asia around 1998, the international influence of Fordian decline and neo‐liberalization as a Korean alternative has been discussed.

A labor perspective on workplace reproductive hazards: past history, current concerns, and positive directions.

The Supreme Court's March 1991 ruling in United Automobile Workers (UAW) versus Johnson Controls barring corporate "fetal protection policies" was a major victory for women's employment rights and has health and safety implications for both sexes. However, 2 years after the Court's decision, the union's work is far from over. The UAW has yet to see what policy Johnson Controls will implement in place of the old one. Formulating solutions to the concerns of workers who are exposed daily to reproductive health hazards on the job will continue to be on labor's agenda. Preventing hazardous exposures is the first priority. This goal would be furthered by setting occupational health and safety standards designed to protect workers' general and reproductive health. Support for the Comprehensive Occupational Safety and Health Reform Act (COSHRA) would also positively affect health and safety in the workplace. Where hazards have not yet been abated, the framework of transfers and income protections for all workers with temporary job restrictions should be examined. The Legal/Labor Working Group convened at the Occupational and Environmental Reproductive Hazards Working Conference authored guidelines for developing a model reproductive hazards policy. These recommendations can serve as a guide for implementation of nondiscriminatory and health-protective policies by employers.

A Progressive Labor Agenda after Reagan

A Progressive Labor Agenda after Reagan