Labor Studies Journal

Labor studies scholars and union organizers agree that rank-and- file union drives are effective, even against union busters, anti- union consultants, and intransigent employers. This paper syn thesizes organizers' analyses of such campaigns in Los Angeles to explain why rank-and-file union drives work. We suggest that anti- union campaigns create fairly standard and locally hegemonic anti- union workplace cultures. We examine struggles between manage ment and unions around workplace social relations and control of space as a Gramscian war of position in which both sides seek to make their ideology and its emotional scaffolding workers' com mon sense. Our explanation for what successful rank-and-file strat egies do also reveals some current limitations.

Surveys demonstrate that U.S. managers, like other workers, want greater voice at work. Many have joined organizations that repre sent employee interests: caucuses based on social identity, pressure groups, and professional associations. In varying degrees, these organizations use old union tactics such as mutual aid, skill-certi fication, and political activity. All these organizations have seri ous limitations. For the benefit of both managers and unions them selves, unions should increase their outreach to these organiza tions and employees. Public-sector unions often include some managers so they provide one model. However, methods of repre sentation beyond collective bargaining are important here. Ad equate representation of managers requires return to Sidney and Beatrice Webb's conception of unions as any continuous associa tion of employees seeking to improve their working lives.

Sweatshops are re-emerging across the globe. In the current neoliberal environment—which has unions, government protec tion of worker rights, and fair trade policies on the defensive—we propose a market-based strategy that relies on "conscientious con sumers" to slow the global race to the bottom. To assess whether the consumer market in the United States could provide the added revenues needed to lift workers in the southern hemisphere up and out of poverty, we conducted an experiment in a department store in a working-class community in southeast Michigan to determine whether consumers would pay more for products certified as not made in sweatshops. Consumers were presented with two separate displays of ordinary athletic socks that were identical except for a label indicating that the socks in one display were produced under "good working conditions." After incrementing the price of the labeled socks over the course of several months, we found that most consumers preferred to pay less for the unlabeled socks, but nearly one in four was willing to pay up to 40 percent more for the labeled socks. Having documented the contours of this niche market for conscience consumption, we conclude by discussing the promises and challenges that face such a market-based strategy.

Some ideas of Reformist "uplift unionism," as exemplified by the nineteenth-century Knights of Labor, have once again become in teresting. Arising in a time of hyper-competition and troubled times for traditional trade unions, the Knights aimed to reform society, primarily through solidarity among producers and the for mation of cooperatives. Their local organizations often included social action groups along with trade unions. Under current con ditions of international hyper-competition and trade union de cline, some of the ideas of the old Knights have new importance. The current concept of unionism as a social movement can be grounded in Reformist notions, as can modern worker-rights orga nizations and the reasoning underlying the workers' capital move ment. Reformism offers a coherent approach to these labor move ment strategies.