Journal articles on the topic 'Labor unions – Organizing – History'
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1
Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph. "Globalization and Transnational Labor Organizing." Social Science History 27, no. 4 (2003): 551–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200012682.
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The proliferation of garment industry sweatshops over the past 20 years has generated numerous cross-border (transnational) organizing campaigns involving U.S., Mexican, and Central American labor unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This article examines one such campaign that took place at the Honduran maquiladora factory known as Kimi. The Kimi workers (along with their transnational allies) struggled for six years before they were legally recognized as a union, and they negotiated one of the few collective bargaining agreements in the entire Central American region. The factory eventually shut down, however. Based on Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang effect” model, this case study analyzes why these positive and negative outcomes occurred. It concludes with some observations about “the enemy” and offers short-, medium-, and long-term suggestions for the broader antisweatshop movement.
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Clark, Paul F. "Organizing the Organizers: Professional Staff Unionism in the American Labor Movement." ILR Review 42, no. 4 (July 1989): 584–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001979398904200408.
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This study summarizes the history of bargaining units formed to represent professional employees of American unions and presents the results of a 1987–88 survey of officers of 40 such professional staff unions. These special unions, which date to the early 1950s, resemble conventional unions in the bargaining issues that are most important to them (job security and salaries), as well as in their relationships with management (in this case, union leaders), which range from amicable to antagonistic. They differ sharply, however, in their infrequent use of strikes. Professional staff unionism is most common in large, industrial unions, less common in smaller industrial, professional, and service unions, and virtually nonexistent in the building trades.
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Zackin, Emily. "“To Change the Fundamental Law of the State”: Protective Labor Provisions in U.S. Constitutions." Studies in American Political Development 24, no. 1 (February 12, 2010): 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898588x09990083.
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As the United States industrialized, its state constitutions began to include protections for laborers. In this article, I describe the origins of these constitutional provisions and ask why labor organizations and other reformers pursued their inclusion in state constitutions. I argue that they saw state constitutions as a vehicle to prompt reluctant legislatures to pass protective statutes, to entrench existing protections against future legislatures, to safeguard labor legislation from constitutional challenges in state courts, and to facilitate further union organizing. Labor activism in this arena is particularly interesting in light of the literature on constitutional change, which contends that constitutional development is a tool through which actors attempt to usher courts into political conflicts; in contrast, I will argue that unions turned to constitutional change in large part to exclude courts from policymaking. Further, the union activism on behalf of constitutional change serves as a challenge to the prominent view among many scholars of American political development and law that judicial hostility to worker rights and union organizing discouraged unions from demanding state protection or institutionalizing their demands through law.
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Wanzo, Rebecca. "Sentimental Solidarities." Film Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2021): 89–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.2.89.
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Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo surveys the history of fictional treatments of labor in US television and film and examines the frequently overlooked role played by sentimentality in media representations of labor and union organizing. Noting that sentimentality has been criticized for its deployment of suffering bodies as “other” objects for voyeuristic tears as well as for sometimes collapsing difference in an effort to construct empathy, Wanzo observes that documentary has often been a more welcoming space for the telling of sympathetic narratives about unions than Hollywood fiction films and television. This makes the depiction of labor and union organizing in Wanzo’s two case studies—the sitcom Superstore (NBC, 2015–21) and the primetime soap Homefront (ABC, 1991–93)—all the more exceptional. At a moment when labor issues are more relevant than ever, Superstore shows people why labor loses, but Homefront reminds people why labor won.
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Friedman, Gerald. "The Political Economy of Early Southern Unionism: Race, Politics, and Labor in the South, 1880–1953." Journal of Economic History 60, no. 2 (June 2000): 384–413. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700025146.
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Southern unions were the weak link in the American labor movement, organizing a smaller share of the labor force than did unions in the northern states or in Europe. Structural conditions, including a racially divided rural population, obstructed southern unionization. The South's distinctive political system also blocked unionization. A strict racial code compelling whites to support the Democratic Party and the disfranchisement of southern blacks and many working-class whites combined to create a one-party political system that allowed southern politicians to ignore labor's demands. Unconstrained by working-class voters, southern politicians facilitated strikebreaking and favored employers against unions.
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Fitzsimmons, Tracy, and Mark Anner. "Civil Society in a Postwar Period: Labor in the Salvadoran Democratic Transition." Latin American Research Review 34, no. 3 (1999): 103–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0023879100039388.
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AbstractThis research note seeks to offer some resolution to the theoretical disagreements over how democratization affects civil society, specifically in a transition toward democracy that occurs through pacted settlements of an armed internal conflict. Using a comparative study over time of the labor movement in El Salvador, the authors demonstrate that while unions of the political center and left have weakened since the signing of the Salvadoran Peace Accords, independent labor groups show higher levels of organizing and right-leaning unions have maintained nearly constant levels of organizing. But the labor movement has become atomized because unions have been unable to redefine their once-common political goals to adopt other unified stances in the postwar period. The data show that the unions that have relinquished excessively politicized stances or never claimed them are the ones that survive and sometimes grow in the postwar environment. These findings have implications for the nature of the emerging Salvadoran democracy and the economic well-being of its citizens.
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Ji, Minsun. "With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives." Capital & Class 44, no. 3 (June 13, 2019): 345–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816819852757.
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To shed light on polarized perspectives regarding the virtues or downfalls of worker cooperatives among variants of Marxists, this article focuses on Marx’s own Janus-faced analysis of worker cooperatives. Marx had great faith in the radical potential of worker cooperatives, properly organized and politically oriented, but he also was greatly critical of the tendency of cooperatives to shrink their political horizons and become isolated from broader labor movements. Although thinkers in the Marxist tradition criticize worker cooperatives when they operate as isolated circles of ‘collective capitalists’ within the existing capitalist system, Marx himself saw important potential in the cooperative movement, to the extent that it was integrated into broader campaigns for social change. Marx believed that cooperatives could help point the way to an alternative system of free and equal producers, and could prompt radical imaginings among their advocates, but only to the extent that cooperative practitioners recognized the need for class-conscious, industrial scale organizing of workers against the capitalist system. In the end, Marx did not so much focus on promoting a certain type of labor organization as being most conducive to transformation (e.g. worker cooperatives or labor unions). Rather, he focused more on the importance of class consciousness within labor organizing, and on the development of radicalized class consciousness among workers, whether through the expansion of labor unions, worker cooperatives, or any other institution of worker empowerment. It is the nature of a labor institution’s focus on developing and sustaining class consciousness, not the nature of the labor institution itself (i.e. cooperative or union), that Marx believed to most powerfully shape the radical or degenerative tendencies of local forms of labor activism.
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Luff, Jennifer. "Labor Anticommunism in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, 1920–49." Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (December 8, 2016): 109–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022009416658701.
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Why did domestic anticommunism convulse the United States of America during the early Cold War but barely ripple in the United Kingdom? Contemporaries and historians have puzzled over the dramatic difference in domestic politics between the USA and the UK, given the countries’ broad alignment on foreign policy toward Communism and the Soviet Union in that era. This article reflects upon the role played by trade unions in the USA and the UK in the development of each country's culture and politics of anticommunism during the interwar years. Trade unions were key sites of Communist organizing, and also of anticommunism, in both the USA and the UK, but their respective labor movements developed distinctively different political approaches to domestic and international communism. Comparing labor anticommunist politics in the interwar years helps explain sharp divergences in the politics of anticommunism in the USA and the UK during the Cold War.
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Frundt, Henry J. "Central American Unions in the Era of Globalization." Latin American Research Review 37, no. 3 (2002): 7–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0023879100024468.
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AbstractGlobalization has exacerbated the impact of three Northern-driven forces on Central American unions. Transnational firms have restructured or enhanced their levels of subcontracting. Governments, while weakening labor-code implemention, have launched extensive privatization schemes. And international supporters of unions have espoused new priorities and rechanneled funding. Although all three trends have caused major difficulties for unions, this article assesses whether or not their traditional spirit of “social-movement unionism” has been undermined. Based on extensive interviews and primary and secondary data, the study documents union resilience in the banana and maquila sectors despite problematic corporate behavior and market conditions. Stung by state privatizations, unions that fragmented following the Central American Peace Accords have partially regrouped to resist public-health takeovers and labor-code harmonization. Facing losses in Northern funding, unions have painfully adapted to fresh organizing strategies and sensitivity to women's issues, which they found to be fundamental to successful collaboration with corporate campaigns, trade pressure, and NGOs. Despite losses, unions have tapped a broader solidarity in their struggle against the demons of globalization.
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Herod, Andrew. "Geographies of Labor Internationalism." Social Science History 27, no. 4 (2003): 501–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200012669.
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Globalization is transforming the spatial organization of the world economy. In particular, it is leading to the “shrinking globe” phenomenon and the speeding up of social interaction between places across the planet. Given that international labor solidarity is a process of coming together across space, I argue that the spatial reorganization of global capitalism has important consequences for practices of solidarity. Specifically, I suggest that the spatial context within which they find themselves is likely to impact the types of political praxis in which workers engage. Thus, whereas globalization may encourage some workers to engage in traditional international solidarity campaigns it might also, paradoxically, lead others to focus on highly local campaigns, the consequences of which can quickly be spread far and wide as a result of the growing spatial interconnectivity of the planet that globalization has augured. Likewise, the spatial context within which they find themselves may lead some workers to defend their class interests while others defend their spatial interests. Equally, while some unions are focusing upon organizing what I call the spaces of production, others are organizing around the spaces of consumption. Given that workers’ spatial context impacts their spatial goals and political praxis, I argue that it is important to conceptualize international labor solidarity in explicitly spatial terms if we are to understand why different groups of workers may pursue radically different types of political praxis in different places and at different times.
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Ringer, Andrea. "“We Fight Anything That Fights the Circus”: Unions and Labor Organizing under the Big Top." Labor 19, no. 3 (September 1, 2022): 8–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9794956.
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Abstract With seasons that often stretched across continents, and a diverse and cosmopolitan group of employees, the circus was a startlingly unique mobile, transient, and global workplace. This article focuses on the significant worker activism in the circus during the late 1930s and early 1940s, particularly as it intersected with labor organizations. In 1938, nearly sixteen hundred laborers with the Ringling Brothers Circus staged a sit-in to protest unfair wages with the help of the AFL. But they were shocked when the circus responded by shutting down for the season, leaving every worker out of a job. The 1938 circus strikes were at the tail end of a long history of negotiations and disputes. These various protests, led by a global workforce of sideshow performers, canvasmen, and high-paid stars from the center ring directly led to the modernization of the circus, along with its subsequent decline. This has larger implications for understanding early globalized workforces and the historic roots of employer responses to demands of a globalized working class.
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Stolte, Carolien. "Introduction: Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise in an Age of Afro-Asian Solidarity." Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (2019): 331–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz098.
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Abstract Across 1950s Afro-Asia, the ongoing process of political decolonization occurred in tandem with increased connection between the local, the regional, and the global. A variety of internationalist movements emerged, much more polyphonic than the voices of the political leaders who had gathered at the Bandung Conference. Trade union networks played a particularly important role not just in organizing labor but in connecting local unions to regional and global ones. These networks were held together by exchanges between local African and Asian trade unions and large international federations such as the World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. But they were held together at least as much by more horizontal connections in pursuit of Afro-Asian solidarity. Many of the latter built on anti-imperialist alliances, revived or reconstituted, dating back to the interwar years. A focus on the trade-union internationalism of the period can recover a “chronology of possibility” in early Cold War Afro-Asia that has since become obscured by the internationalist failings of the 1960s. It also demonstrates the limited analytical value of the term “non-alignment” for the broader Afro-Asian moment during the early years of the Cold War. Instead, it recasts the 1950s as a global moment for Afro-Asia, in which internationalists built networks that were elastic enough to encompass a wide variety of actors and ideas and resistant enough to withstand the pressure of bodies larger and more powerful.
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Satı, Büşra. "Working-Class Women, Gender, and Union Politics in Turkey, 1965–1980." International Labor and Working-Class History 100 (2021): 87–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547921000119.
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AbstractThis paper focuses on the ideology and discourses of Tekstil İṣçileri Sendikası (the Textile Workers’ Union, Tekstil) in Turkey to highlight some of the specific visions of the organized labor for an emancipatory gender politics during the 1970s. This history of intersection between gender and working-class organizing has been overlooked by the Left scholarship on the one hand and liberal feminist scholarship on the other. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by highlighting gender and class concurrently throughout the history of the transformation of gender politics in labor organizations. The history of the simultaneous development of gender-related policies in Tekstil/DİSK and TEKSİF/Türk-İṣ reveals an unexplored aspect of the contentious dynamic between rival labor organizations. Between 1975–1980, the politics of gender became another pillar in trade union competition. Following the transnational influences in this transformation, this paper highlights a forgotten period of labor organizing and locates it within the history of labor and women's movements at the national and global scale.
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Daria, James. "Fairwashing and Union Busting: The Privatization of Labor Standards in Mexico’s Agro-export Industry." Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 38, no. 3 (2022): 379–405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/msem.2022.38.3.379.
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While Mexico’s agricultural exports have rapidly expanded over the past two decades, a strike by farmworkers in San Quintín, Baja California, in 2015 drew attention to the labor problems and workers’ demands in the industry. In response, foreign agribusiness corporations implemented private labor standards through fair-trade labels to address these problems in their global produce supply chains. Based on ethnographic research, I argue that these private standards fail to improve farmworkers’ labor conditions and instead serve to “fairwash” fresh produce and to prevent union organizing even when rights under Mexican law are violated. While fair-trade programs provide little empowerment to agricultural workers, I document how farmworkers have developed alternative visions of food justice through independent labor organizing.
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Higbie, Tobias, and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado. "The Border at Work: Undocumented Workers, the ILGWU in Los Angeles, and the Limits of Labor Citizenship." Labor 19, no. 4 (December 1, 2022): 58–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10032376.
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Abstract In 2000, the AFL-CIO officially embraced the call for amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers, reversing long-standing policy in favor of greater restriction and border enforcement. The roots of this new approach stretched back to the 1970s, when the growing presence of undocumented workers in the industrial workforce challenged organized labor's nationalist orthodoxy. Taking the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in Los Angeles as a case study, we show how one union confronted new demographic and organizing realities and recognized the demand for unionization among new immigrants. Radical community organizers, legal advocates, and union organizing staff created a practice of labor citizenship, the recognition of the immigrants’ right to remain by virtue the demand for their labor. The promise of belonging through organizing and collective bargaining was limited by state power and the structural weakness of organized labor in the emerging neoliberal economy. Nevertheless, ILGWU campaigns trained a cohort of organizers that would become central to the union upsurge in Los Angeles during the 1990s.
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Goldman, Debbie. "Dialing for Change: Organizing Call Center Workers in the 1990s." Labor 18, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 40–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9361765.
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Abstract This article contrasts two Communications Workers of America (CWA) strategic organizing campaigns at Sprint and Southwestern Bell wireless in the 1990s. In the first case, the NLRA failed to protect Sprint workers after their employer closed the call center to avoid a union election, despite a complaint filed by a Mexican union under labor provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the second case, the CWA's “bargain to organize” strategy neutralized Southwestern Bell's opposition, and 40,000 wireless workers chose CWA representation under a negotiated neutrality/card-check recognition process. This article demonstrates how neoliberal regulatory changes in the telecommunications sector in combination with weak labor laws fostered the decline in union representation in this vitally important and dynamic sector of the economy.
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Dingwall, Orvie, Lyle Ford, and Ruby Warren. "Ready for a Fair Deal." Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 8 (January 4, 2023): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v8.38565.
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Canadian academic libraries are unionized environments, requiring collective organization and action to address labour conditions and contract negotiations. The University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) has 1264 members, including 52 archivists and librarians, and in 2021 resolved the longest strike in association history. The newly ratified agreement contained major gains to advance pay equity within the union, and the strike itself maintained UMFA historic high levels of participation and member engagement, in part due to the significant contributions of librarians and archivists. In this paper, three librarians who held distinct positions of leadership within UMFA, particularly during its 2021 strike, examine the unique strengths and difficulties of librarians and archivists working within a broader faculty union to make change. Relying on core competencies of librarianship, such as collaboration, consultation, communication, and leadership, the authors collectively and successfully filled central roles in the strategic direction, organizational foundation, and on-the-ground mobilization of the strike effort. The historical context for the labour climate and organizing history at the University of Manitoba is examined and demonstrates that core competencies of librarians and archivists are valuable and imperative skills in faculty union organizing. Librarians and archivists can use this narrative to inform the development of their own activism within their unions and workplaces, and to examine how their own skills may help enhance and improve their working conditions.
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Dingwall, Orvie, Lyle Ford, and Ruby Warren. "Ready for a Fair Deal." Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 8 (January 4, 2023): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v8.38832.
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Canadian academic libraries are unionized environments, requiring collective organization and action to address labour conditions and contract negotiations. The University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) has 1264 members, including 52 archivists and librarians, and in 2021 resolved the longest strike in association history. The newly ratified agreement contained major gains to advance pay equity within the union, and the strike itself maintained UMFA historic high levels of participation and member engagement, in part due to the significant contributions of librarians and archivists. In this paper, three librarians who held distinct positions of leadership within UMFA, particularly during its 2021 strike, examine the unique strengths and difficulties of librarians and archivists working within a broader faculty union to make change. Relying on core competencies of librarianship, such as collaboration, consultation, communication, and leadership, the authors collectively and successfully filled central roles in the strategic direction, organizational foundation, and on-the-ground mobilization of the strike effort. The historical context for the labour climate and organizing history at the University of Manitoba is examined and demonstrates that core competencies of librarians and archivists are valuable and imperative skills in faculty union organizing. Librarians and archivists can use this narrative to inform the development of their own activism within their unions and workplaces, and to examine how their own skills may help enhance and improve their working conditions.
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Barrett, James R. "Whiteness Studies: Anything Here for Historians of the Working Class?" International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 33–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547901004392.
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This response takes up four of Eric Arnesen's many objections to whiteness research: (1) the fuzziness of the definitions for “whiteness”; (2) the notion of a process by which European immigrants “became white”; (3) the sloppy research methods; and (4) the political posturing of some authors. Although I consider a range of works, I concentrate mainly on those of David Roediger. A serious analysis of the roots of white working-class racism was long overdue, and Roediger and his colleagues have advanced this study significantly. They have demonstrated the severe social limits and the racist implications of labor republicanism, an organizing principle for so much nineteenth-century labor history. They have placed racial identity at the center of class analysis and focused attention on the racialized character of class experience and consciousness. The notion of socially constructed understandings of race has also stimulated a more interethnic approach in studies of immigrant workers, and helped to bridge the obvious divisions between labor history and African-American, Asian-American, and Latina/o history. The study of whiteness has helped us to “denaturalize” race and look much more closely at the whole idea of white identity. We are due for a critical evaluation of this literature from the perspective of labor history, but it is far too early to discard the concept of “whiteness.” On the contrary, the most important work, in the form of rigorous studies of particular workplaces, unions, and communities, is really just beginning. In the meantime, the work has stimulated some much-needed rethinking.
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Duin, Pieter Van. "White Building Workers and Coloured Competition in the South African Labour Market, c. 1890–1940." International Review of Social History 37, no. 1 (April 1992): 59–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020859000110934.
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SummaryThe article deals with “racial” aspects of the labour market and labour relations in South Africa's building industry, focussing largely, though not exclusively, on skilled building workers on the Witwatersrand (Southern Transvaal). Different trade-union strategies are examined, as pursued by building trade unions in the Transvaal as well as the Eastern Cape and Natal, in order to add a comparative dimension. In the latter areas, shortly after World War I, a white-exclusionist organizing policy was replaced in some urban centres by a pragmatic strategy of incorporating “coloured” artisans (Africans and Indians continued to be excluded). In the Transvaal, on the other hand, the relatively strong position of white building workers and a deeply-ingrained racism ensured the maintenance of racially-exclusive trade unionism in the building industry.
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Tucker, Sean, and Alex Mucalov. "Industrial Voluntarism in Canada." Articles 65, no. 2 (August 31, 2010): 215–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/044300ar.
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The term “industrial voluntarism” has been used to describe the norm that dominated union organizing and, more broadly, union-management relations in Canada during most of the first half of the 20thcentury. In practical terms, the principle defines situations in which unions and employers initiate, develop, and enforce agreements without state assistance or compulsion. This paper investigates the history of voluntarism in Canada with attention to post-war legal accommodations and various manifestations of voluntarism related to union recognition. We show how aspects of the Framework of Fairness Agreement (FFA) negotiated between Magna International and the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) in 2007 is informed by industrial voluntarism. The FFA facilitates voluntary recognition of CAW locals at Magna plants in exchange for a no-strike promise and acceptance of many features of Magna’s existing human resource management system. Overall, the historical and contemporary evidence show that voluntarism continues to manifest in different forms in response to changing labour relations conditions.
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Munger, Frank. "Legal Resources of Striking Miners: Notes for a Study of Class Conflict and Law." Social Science History 15, no. 1 (1991): 1–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014555320002099x.
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Union miners stand together,Heed no operator’s tale.Keep your hands upon the dollar,And your eyes upon the scale.—verse from “Miner’s Lifeguard” [Silverman 1975: 389]In 1895, Fayette County, West Virginia, a leading coal county in the southern West Virginia coal fields, experienced widespread strikes by miners. The strikes were remarkable because, in an American industry known for violent labor relations and intensive union organizing since the appearance of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania before 1880, this was the first major strike in southern West Virginia. We might attempt to understand the role of law and public authority in these strikes in terms of legal repression by means of the labor injunction, labor conspiracy laws, and strikebreaking by the police and military. But none of these occurred in Fayette in 1895, though the later history of labor conflict in West Virginia is replete with all of them. In another way, however, the legal events accompanying these strikes are far more remarkable and challenge us to examine more subtle connections between class conflict and law.
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Massie, Alicia, and Yi Chien Jade Ho. "“Working Women Unite”: Exploring a Socialist Feminist, Nonhierarchical Teachers Union." Labor Studies Journal 45, no. 1 (March 2020): 32–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0160449x20909935.
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In this paper, we present and explore the case of the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU), an independent, directly democratic, and feminist labor union at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Operating continuously since the 1970s, we argue that TSSU is an important example of the ways in which gender and class have intersected within the history of the Canadian labor movement, and a fascinating case of a longstanding socialist feminist union. We also argue that alongside the historical relevance, exploring the constraints and possibilities of a feminist nonhierarchical organizational structure can offer important lessons for organizing in the twenty-first century. Adopting a socialist feminist framework, we speak from our experiences serving as TSSU executives, as graduate students, and as teachers within the larger academic machine. Marking its fortieth year in 2018, this active, young, and angry labor union can provide the labor movement and academics with a case study to reflect on how we can conceptualize social movement unionism; organize around and toward equity, diversity, and justice; and maintain a deep commitment to both feminist and class struggle.
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Smith, Sara R. "Queers are Workers, Workers are Queer, Workers' Rights are Hot! The Emerging Field of Queer Labor History." International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (2016): 184–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014754791500040x.
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Gay male stewards performing drag shows on large passenger ships in the 1930s. Male hustlers selling sex to men for money and then going home to their girlfriends in the 1950s. Lesbian bus drivers organizing in the 1970s to include “sexual orientation” in their union contract's antidiscrimination clause. Gay male flight attendants fired from their jobs for being HIV-positive in the 1980s. These are some of the stories told in the four books under review, each about the queer labor history of the United States.
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Smith, Julia. "Steelworkers in Struggle." Monthly Review 68, no. 10 (March 7, 2017): 59. http://dx.doi.org/10.14452/mr-068-10-2017-03_7.
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Ahmed White's vivid and deeply researched account of the Little Steel strike of 1937 makes an important contribution to our understanding of U.S. labor history, union organizing, and class conflict. It illustrates the tactical complexity of strikes, reveals the power and ruthlessness of employers, and demonstrates the risks of relying on the state to secure justice for working people.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
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Weber, Devra Anne. "Wobblies of the Partido Liberal Mexicano." Pacific Historical Review 85, no. 2 (May 1, 2016): 188–226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/phr.2016.85.2.188.
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This article examines the Mexican grassroots base of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and PLM members who belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It suggests that a grassroots perspective, one that is also multilingual and transnational, reframes both the PLM and the IWW. Eschewing an institutional approach, this perspective suggests that the organizational underbelly for much of this work rested with Mexican social networks that formed the labor crews, strikes, foci, and union locals. PLM supporters prepared for a Mexican revolution. Some of them did so while organizing IWW locals. Within the context of the intense migration of the period, labor and revolutionary foci moved across binational space, facilitating the spread of ideas, organizing, strikes, and revolutionary forays that were, in effect, binational “circularities of struggle.” These Wobblies of the PLM challenged industrial capitalism, questioned U.S. imperialism and racism, and helped launch the first social revolution in Mexico. This perspective reframes the IWW as one part of a spectrum of organizations attempting to counteract dispossession; yet it simultaneously reveals the organization as more expansive, diverse, multilingual, and transnational than previously presented. By decentering the United States and Europe, this Mexican perspective contributes to a re-envisioned transnational internationalist Left that includes the Americas and opens interpretative frameworks that cross gender, racial, ethnic, and national categories.
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Elbert, Rodolfo. "Union Organizing after the Collapse of Neoliberalism in Argentina: The Place of Community in the Revitalization of the Labor Movement (2005–2011)." Critical Sociology 43, no. 1 (July 28, 2016): 129–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0896920515570369.
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Recent Argentine history showed that since 2003 the labor movement became increasingly relevant due to protests organized by unionized formal workers. Labor revitalization in a context of persistent informality raised the following question: Were there union organizing strategies that related formal workers to the broader working class community that included informal workers? This article answered the question through the analysis of union strategies from three formal sector firms located in one city of the Northern Gran Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 2005 and 2011. The evidence from this comparison showed that in two of the factories there were union strategies to reach the community. The existence of a grassroots democratic union in the shop floor appeared as a necessary condition for inclusive union strategies. The scale of those relations varied according to the geographical pattern of workers’ housing, which was the result of the company’s localization strategy.
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Martin, Andrew W. "Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing By Jamie K. McCallum Cornell University Press. 2013. 232 pages. $21.95 paperback, $65.00 hardback." Social Forces 94, no. 3 (April 7, 2014): e74-e74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sf/sou041.
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Ngai, Mae. "Understanding Contemporary Workers' Struggles: Remembering David Montgomery." International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012): 48–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547912000221.
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I was not one of David's students, though I wanted to be. I had applied to Yale for graduate school and had gone up to New Haven to meet him beforehand. But I didn't get in. Apparently, the admissions committee (which he wasn't on that year) considered it too risky to admit someone who had worked in the labor movement, in light of the union organizing going on among Yale's graduate students and employees. I thought this was ironic because, although I was sympathetic to the Yale organizing, I was searching for the life of the mind. If I had wanted to organize workers, I would have continued what I was already doing. In any case, I ended up elsewhere, and I've had no complaints about my graduate education. David and I stayed in touch over the years, and I was honored by a kind review he wrote of my first book in the Journal of Social History.
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Konefsky, Alfred S. "“As Best to Subserve Their Own Interests”: Lemuel Shaw, Labor Conspiracy, and Fellow Servants." Law and History Review 7, no. 1 (1989): 219–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/743781.
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Over thirty years ago, Leonard Levy, building explicitly on suggestions first offered by Walter Nelles, and implicitly on observations made by Roscoe Pound, commented on the unusual conjunction of two decisions announced within weeks of each other in 1842 by Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The cases, Farwell v. Boston & Worcester Railroad which helped create the fellow servant rule in the United States, and Commonwealth v. Hunt, which involved a prosecution for criminal conspiracy for organizing a labor union as a closed shop, seemed at odds. Hunt appeared to expand worker rights to collective action, while Farwell appeared to restrict worker rights to compensation from workplace injuries. Shaw's apparent protection of a worker's right to organize, “a pro-worker stance,” seemed to conflict with his refusal to recognize a worker's right to recover for an industrial accident in particular circumstances, “an anti-worker stance.” The question is obvious—how can these decisions be made compatible, or does their incompatibility have to be accepted with a shrug of the shoulders and a nod toward the evolutionary progress of the common law?
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Martens, Allison M. "Working Women or Women Workers? The Women's Trade Union League and the Transformation of the American Constitutional Order." Studies in American Political Development 23, no. 2 (September 25, 2009): 143–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898588x09990034.
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Labor, gender and, class have each been identified as important reconstructive forces of the American constitutional order, but rarely has a single organization provided an opportunity to directly study the interrelationship of all these forces during a critical period of constitutional change. This article examines one such organization during the years leading up to the New Deal: The Women's Trade Union League. The WTUL, which uniquely mixed middle-class and working-class membership, was founded in 1903 to facilitate trade union organizing by women. Its labor approach, however, would ultimately fail, pushing the league to more fully embrace its connections to the middle-class leadership of the women's movement, thereby transforming its strategic approach and constitutional outlook away from the anti-statist voluntarism of the labor movement to the pragmatic and statist maternalism of the women's movement. The WTUL would subsequently become an important contributor to the legislative program of progressive reformers flourishing during this period under the gendered exception to free contract liberty won inMuller v. Oregonin 1908. This strategic organizational transformation would create tensions within the league and between the league and women workers, as well as invite constitutional consequences for women workers that would resonate for years, long past the constitutional revolution of 1937 and the apparent constitutional reintegration of male and female labor. This case study, therefore, provides a unique lens through which to view not only the constitutional tradeoffs of the adoption of the gendered Constitution as an alternative to the labor Constitution, but also the impact of the resource-conscious decision making of social-movement actors that is often overlooked by constitutional scholars preoccupied with judicial decision making.
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Kinsella, Timothy K. "A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism. By Lisa Phillips. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 231. $50.00.)." Historian 76, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 599–600. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/hisn.12048_25.
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Orleck, Annelise. "“There Is Not a Factory Today Where This Same Immoral Condition Does Not Exist”: Strikes against Sexual Harassment, 1912–2019." Labor 19, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 74–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9475730.
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Abstract From 1912 to 2019, low-wage women workers have used the strike to resist sexual violence and harassment on the shop floor. This article examines two strike actions, more than a century apart. First it looks at the 1912 Kalamazoo Corset Co. strike, the first known strike against sexual harassment in the United States. Comparing it to a multicity anti-sexual-harassment strike wave by McDonald’s workers in 2018–19 (mostly women of color), the article assesses the increasing importance of race in women’s union organizing as well as the impact of the #MeToo movement on women’s labor activism.
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Bovino, Emily Verla. "On union, displaced: Capture and captivity with the Hong Kong Artist Union (HKAU)." Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 1 (July 1, 2021): 49–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jcca_00037_1.
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In 2016, between Guangdong strikes in mainland China and Hong Kong’s unionization momentum, Hong Kong artist Wong Ka Ying posted a call on Facebook founding the Hong Kong Artist Union (HKAU). The gesture followed the mischievously named Come Inside, Hong Kong’s ‘first female artist duo’ created by Wong and artist Mak Ying Tung, which declared it would combat art’s ‘formalized system’. Ironically, one of its first actions was to enrol in a course on insurance that could help it formalize healthcare for artists. Come Inside welcomed the idea that opposition to the ‘system’ brings artists into it. HKAU took shape within this ‘trap’ when Wong and Mak started researching trade unions. ‘On Union, Displaced’ explores the past four years of HKAU existing as a union-not-yet-registered-as-an-official-union, a serious gesture of ludic conceptualism that plays with artistic freedom’s relationship to captivity and capture. Through Rey Chow’s theory of conceptual art as trap, it traces HKAU’s entanglement in the history of Hong Kong art groups, regional labour organizing, and efforts to reground the term ‘artist’. Studying HKAU requires various conceptual frameworks: Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics; Laikwan Pang’s multiple sovereignties; Sandro Mezzandra and Brett Neilson’s border-as-method; Linda Lai Chiu-han’s performative research; and Frank Vigneron’s plastician. The article explores how being ‘plastic’ ‐ a union displaced; a union whose registration with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is perpetually negotiated ‐ has helped HKAU pose important questions about solidarity and sovereignty in art.
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Lee, Joong-Jae. "Defense Workers' Struggles for Patriotic Control: The Labor-Management-State Contests over Defense Production at Brewster, 1940–1944." International Labor and Working-Class History 66 (October 2004): 136–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547904000213.
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Labor historians have heretofore presented bifurcated portrayals of the relationship between defense workers and the wartime, corporatist state during the Second World War. While liberal CIO leaders energetically tried to establish labor's greater representation in wartime mobilization and politics through patriotic social unionism, militant rank and filers turned out to be antistate wildcatters. In contrast, this local study of Brewster workers producing naval aircraft suggests that the wartime fetish with patriotic productivity had converging impacts on the relationship of both international union leaders and rank and filers with the state. Industrial mobilization by the military simultaneously demanded and impeded orderly expansion of production, which in the process manufactured faltering companies like Brewster. Brewster workers, criticizing corporate and military mismanagement and calling for state intervention as a political remedy in their political letters and confidential reports, intensified their contests for joint control of production, employment, and planning. However, their struggles for patriotic control were contingent upon the Navy's continuous demands for Brewster planes, skills, and facilities and thus could not survive reconversion downsizing in defense production. Union leaders retreated into organizing new shops in metropolitan New York, which primarily involved routine interplays between few union leaders and NLRB officials. The reconversion at Brewster marked the postwar bureaucratization of defense workers' relationship with the state.
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James, Leslie. "“Essential Things Such as Typewriters”: Development Discourse, Trade Union Expertise, and the Dialogues of Decolonization between the Caribbean and West Africa." Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (2019): 378–401. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz100.
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Abstract This article examines how the liberatory ideals of transnational projects could become codified in particular processes of thought, deed, and expression. During his term of service in Nigeria between 1960 and 1962 the Trinidadian union leader McDonald Moses mobilized a number of phenomena central to the transformative projects of the mid-twentieth century: the paramountcy of psychology to “true” transformation and change; the embrace of programmatic action; and the belief that both psychological transformation and programmatic action could be articulated through new and enlightened forms of expression. While histories that embrace a “cultural turn” tend to look for this expression in creative forms and artistic production, this article looks to daily administrivia as part of an explicitly political project that aimed to improve the lives of workers by changing their modes of organizing and, consequently, the culture of politics and labor.
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Williams, Charles. "The Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism: New Deal Liberalism and the Subordination of Black Workers in the UAW." Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 1 (April 2005): 75–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898588x05000040.
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In February 1937, members of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) celebrated their pioneering victory over General Motors by waving American flags as they marched out of Fisher Body and paraded through the streets of Flint, Michigan. Later that year, as the UAW turned to organizing Ford's massive River Rouge plant, the Ford edition of the United Automobile Worker described the complex as a foreign country and called on workers to “win this for America” and “win the war for democracy in River Rouge!” When a successful strike finally led to union recognition and an NLRB election in 1941, the UAW urged Rouge workers to “keep faith with America” and its greatest leaders, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, by voting for the inclusive unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) over the un-American alternative of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
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Hecker, Steven. "Hazard Pay for COVID-19? Yes, But It’s Not a Substitute for a Living Wage and Enforceable Worker Protections." NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 30, no. 2 (June 20, 2020): 95–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1048291120933814.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing critical failures in public and occupational health in the United States. So-called hazard pay for essential workers is a necessary but insufficient response to the lack of workplace protections. The roots of these failures in the weakening of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement and pandemic preparedness and the dramatic shifts in the economy and labor market in recent decades are explored along with the history of hazard pay. The current prominence of COVID-19-related workplace hazards, and the mobilization by both nonunion and union workers experiencing them, presents opportunities amid the crisis and tragic losses to envision a revival of worker protection measures. Strategies are needed for organizing and legislative advocacy to address the disparate impact of both normal and crisis conditions on low-wage workers, especially women and workers of color.
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Cain, Timothy Reese. "The First Attempts to Unionize the Faculty." Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 112, no. 3 (March 2010): 876–913. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/016146811011200310.
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Background/Context Faculty unionization is an important topic in modern higher education, but the history of the phenomenon has not yet been fully considered. This article brings together issues of professionalization and unionization and provides needed historical background to ongoing unionization efforts and debates. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article examines the context of, debates surrounding, and ultimate failure of the first attempts to organize faculty unions in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Following a discussion of the institutional change of the period and the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as an explicitly nonlabor organization, this article considers the founding, endeavors, and demise of 20 American Federation of Teachers (AFT) locals. In doing so, it demonstrates long-standing divisions within the faculty and concerns regarding professional unionization. Research Design The article uses historical methods and archival evidence to recover and interpret these early debates over the unionization of college faculty. It draws on numerous collections in institutional and organizational archives, as well as contemporaneous newspaper and magazine accounts and the writings of faculty members embroiled in debates over unionization. Discussion Beginning with the founding of AFT Local 33 at Howard University in November 1918, college and normal school faculty organized 20 separate union locals for a variety of social, economic, and institutional reasons before the end of 1920. Some faculty believed that affiliating with labor would provide them with greater voices in institutional governance and offer the possibility of obtaining higher wages. Others saw in organizing a route to achieving academic freedom and job security. Still others believed that, amidst the difficult postwar years, joining the AFT could foster larger societal and educational change, including providing support for K–12 teachers who were engaged in struggles for status and improved working conditions. Despite these varied possibilities, most faculty did not organize, and many both inside and outside academe expressed incredulity that college and university professors would join the labor movement. In the face of institutional and external pressure, and with many faculty members either apathetic about or opposed to unionization, this first wave of faculty unionization concluded in the early 1920s with the closing of all but one of the campus locals. Conclusions/Recommendations Unionization in higher education remains contested despite the tremendous growth in organization in recent decades. The modern concerns, as well as the ways that they are overcome, can be traced to the 1910s and 1920s.
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McIlroy, John. "Organizing for partnership: the influence of the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organisations on the British Trades Union Congress 1995–2005." Labor History 54, no. 2 (May 2013): 138–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0023656x.2013.773143.
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Arnesen, Eric. "Phillips Lisa. A Renegade Union. Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism. [The Working Class in American History.] University of Illinois Press, Urbana [etc.] 2013. xv, 231 pp. Ill. $50.00." International Review of Social History 59, no. 01 (April 2014): 146–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002085901400008x.
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Nissen, B. "Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement Edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss Cornell University Press, 2004. 309 pages. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)." Social Forces 84, no. 3 (March 1, 2006): 1858–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sof.2006.0062.
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Stewart, Paul, Andy Danford, and Edson Urano. "Organizing Latin American workers in Japan." Employee Relations 39, no. 3 (April 3, 2017): 365–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/er-03-2016-0054.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess difficulties facing the unionization of foreign workers focusing on the experience of trade unionists in Union MIE, an exemplar of what in Japan is known as a community union (sometimes described as a form of Minority union – Stewart, 2006). Union MIE is characterized by its orientation to the social and political agenda of Latin American workers, among whom Brazilians form the most numerous group. The paper also addresses the precarious nature of workers’ employment including the condition of labor. The increasing significance of community unions raises the question as to the possibility of the reregulation of worker interests in ways not fully encompassed by traditional labor market-focused unions. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores unique interviews using snowball technique and direct questionnaires to union membership of community union in Japan. Findings The increasing significance of community unions raises the question as to the possibility of the reregulation of worker interests in ways not fully encompassed by traditional labor market-focused unions. In addition to having relevance to the wider discussion on union decline, this paper contributes to the debate on migrant workers, their condition of labor and one form of labor organization responsive to their concerns. Research limitations/implications A comparative approach would add even more to the weight of evidence accrued in the paper. Practical implications Mainstream trade unions need to anticipate that the concerns of migrant and precarious workers will become increasingly common among their erstwhile “regularly” employed membership and so the activities of community and minority unions need to be taken on board in an organic, as opposed to an opportunistic, manner. Originality/value From unique interviews using snowball technique and direct questionnaires to union membership of community union in Japan, the paper presents original data not typically accessible in Anglo-Saxon research tradition.
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Rogers, Sean E., Adrienne E. Eaton, Paula B. Voos, Tracy F. H. Chang, and Marcus A. Valenzuela. "Assessing Employee Support during Union Organizing Campaigns." Labor Studies Journal 44, no. 4 (October 10, 2018): 285–313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0160449x18803694.
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Many labor unions assess support among prospective members to guide decision making during organizing campaigns, and to predict voting in representation elections. However, research on the actual practice of how unions make assessments is limited. We fill this void through a study that combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of the assessment activities. The quantitative portion involved a survey of eligible voters in the 2010 flight attendant representation election at Delta Air Lines. The qualitative portion involved in-depth interviews with staff involved in that campaign and organizing directors or key organizing staff in nine of the largest labor unions in the United States. We focus on the factors that influence the accuracy of assessment predictions, describe practices currently being used to predict votes in these campaigns, and discuss future research needs.
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Brown, Cliff, and John Brueggemann. "Mobilizing Interracial Solidarity: A Comparison of The 1919 and 1937 Steel Industry Labor Organizing Drives." Mobilization: An International Quarterly 2, no. 1 (March 1, 1997): 47–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.17813/maiq.2.1.h7627q8274573037.
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We examine working-class race relations during two steel industry unionization efforts: the 1919 AFL drive and the 1937 CIO drive. Racial conflict divided steel workers in 1919 but interracial labor solidarity prevailed in 1937. We contrast the two drives using event-structure analysis (ESA) to highlight the imputed causal connections in our argument. Comparison of the 1919 and 1937 cases suggests that three developments were necessary for interracial solidarity in steel. First, industrial unions had to replace craft unions, which promoted class-oriented organizing strategies. Second, interracial solidarity required an easing of split labor market conditions. Third, unions had to incorporate concrete strategies to recruit black workers. In both cases, state actions and economic conditions mediated the impact of these factors on interracial organizing.
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I. Sachs, Benjamin. "THE UNBUNDLED UNION." Revista Direito das Relações Sociais e Trabalhistas 4, no. 2 (October 9, 2019): 16–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.26843/mestradodireito.v4i2.126.
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Public policy in the United States is disproportionately responsive to the wealthy, and the traditional response to this problem, campaign finance regulation, has failed. As students of politics have long recognized, however, political influence flows not only from wealth but also from organization, a form of political power open to all income groups. Accordingly, as this Essay argues, a promising alternative to campaign finance regulations is legal interventions designed to facilitate political organizing by the poor and middle class. To date, the most important legal intervention of this kind has been labor law, and the labor union has been the central vehicle for this type of organizing. But the labor union as a political-organizational vehicle suffers a fundamental flaw: unions bundle political organization with collective bargaining, a highly contested form of economic organization. As a result, opposition to collective bargaining impedes unions’ ability to serve as a political-organizing vehicle for lowerand middle-income groups. This Essay proposes that labor law unbundle the union, allowing employees to organize politically through the union form without also organizing economically for collective bargaining purposes. Doing so would have the immediate effect of liberating political-organizational efforts from the constraints of collective bargaining, an outcome that could mitigate representational inequality. The Essay identifies the legal reforms that would be necessary to enable such unbundled “political unions” to succeed. It concludes by looking beyond the union context and suggesting a broader regime of reforms aimed at facilitating political organizing by those income groups for whom representational inequality is now a problem.
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Wallerstein, Michael. "Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies." American Political Science Review 83, no. 2 (June 1989): 481–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1962401.
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I suggest a new explanation of cross-national differences in unionization rates: the size of the labor force. Size matters because the gains unions are able to achieve in collective bargaining depend on the proportion of substitutable workers who are organized, while the costs of organizing depend in part on the absolute number to be recruited. The comparison of the costs and benefits of organizing new workers yields the conclusion that unions in larger labor markets will accept lower levels of unionization. Statistical analysis of cross-national differences in unionization rates among advanced industrial societies in the late 1970s indicates that the size of the labor force and the cumulative participation of leftist parties in government explain most of the variance.
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Dixon, Marc. "Limiting Labor: Business Political Mobilization and Union Setback in the States." Journal of Policy History 19, no. 3 (July 2007): 313–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jph.2007.0015.
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The 1940s were heady times for the American labor movement. The tight wartime labor market and the backing of the federal government in defense industries facilitated impressive membership gains for both AFL and CIO unions. By 1945, labor unions represented almost 35 percent of the workforce—a more than fivefold increase from the early 1930s. What is more, union membership gains penetrated previously unorganized and resistant regions like the South. Unions indeed appeared on the verge of recruiting millions of new members and establishing a truly national social movement. Critics and supporters alike viewed unions as the most powerful institutions of the day. Following the war,Fortune Magazineforesaw little resistance to unionism and to the postwar southern labor organizing drives, while sympathetic scholars like C. Wright Mills viewed labor leaders as the “new men of power.”
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MacKlem, Patrick. "Book Review: Labor-Management Relations: A Guide to Organizing Unions." ILR Review 44, no. 4 (July 1991): 761–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001979399104400413.
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Hart, Jennifer. "Motor Transportation, Trade Unionism, and the Culture of Work in Colonial Ghana." International Review of Social History 59, S22 (September 5, 2014): 185–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020859014000339.
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AbstractThe emergence of drivers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s highlights the wide range of strategies for social and economic organization available to workers in the Gold Coast. Particularly among workers who operated outside the conventional categories of the colonial economy, unions provided only one of many models for labor organization. This article argues that self-employed drivers appropriated unions and an international discourse of labor organization in the early twentieth century in order to best represent their interests to the colonial government. However, their understanding of the function and organization of unions reflected a much broader repertoire of social and economic organizing practices. Rather than representing any exceptional form of labor organization, drivers highlight the circulation of multiple ideas surrounding labor organization in the early decades of the twentieth century, which informed the ways in which Africans engaged in the wage labor economy and implicitly challenged British colonial assumptions about labor, authority, and control.