Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions

Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions PDF

Author: Fiona Colgan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1134582080

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The pressures of globalization and diversity are increasingly requiring organizations to rethink their priorities and methods. In this collection, leading researchers examine the debates and developments on gender, diversity and democracy in trade unions in eleven countries. Offering an authoritative basis for comparative analysis, this book is essential reading for researchers, teachers, trade unionists and students of industrial relations and equal opportunities, along with all those concerned with ensuring that modern organizations reflect and represent the needs and concerns of a diverse workforce.

The Other Women's Movement

The Other Women's Movement PDF

Author: Dorothy Sue Cobble

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-08-15

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1400840864

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American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired them and the reforms they secured from employers and the state. This socially and ethnically diverse movement for change emerged first from union halls and factory floors and spread to the "pink collar" domain of telephone operators, secretaries, and airline hostesses. From the 1930s to the 1980s, these women pursued answers to problems that are increasingly pressing today: how to balance work and family and how to address the growing economic inequalities that confront us. The Other Women's Movement traces their impact from the 1940s into the feminist movement of the present. The labor reformers whose stories are told in The Other Women's Movement wanted equality and "special benefits," and they did not see the two as incompatible. They argued that gender differences must be accommodated and that "equality" could not always be achieved by applying an identical standard of treatment to men and women. The reform agenda they championed--an end to unfair sex discrimination, just compensation for their waged labor, and the right to care for their families and communities--launched a revolution in employment practices that carries on today. Unique in its range and perspective, this is the first book to link the continuous tradition of social feminism to the leadership of labor women within that movement.

On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

On Gender, Labor, and Inequality PDF

Author: Ruth Milkman

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-07-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0252098587

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Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers. A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.

Workplace Justice

Workplace Justice PDF

Author: Sharon Kurtz

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780816633142

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In 1991, Columbia University's one thousand clerical workers launched a successful campaign for justice in their workplace. This diverse union -- two-thirds black and Latina, three-fourths women -- was committed to creating an inclusive movement organization and to fighting for all kinds of justice. How could they address the many race and gender injustices members faced, avoid schism, and maintain the unity needed to win? Sharon Kurtz, an experienced union activist and former clerical worker herself, was welcomed into the union and pursued these questions. Using this case study and secondary studies of sister clerical unions at Yale and Harvard, she examines the challenges and potential of identity politics in labor movements. With the Columbia strike as a point of departure, Kurtz argues that identity politics are valuable for mobilizing groups, but often exclude members and their experiences of oppression. However, Kurtz believes that identity politics should not be abandoned as a component in building movements, but should be reframed -- as multi-identity politics. In the end she shows an approach to organizing with great potential impact not only for labor unions but for any social movement.

Dishing It Out

Dishing It Out PDF

Author: Dorothy Cobble

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1991-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0252096231

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Back when SOS or Adam and Eve on a raft were things to order if you were hungry but a little short on time and money, nearly one-fourth of all waitresses belonged to unions. By the time their movement peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, the women had developed a distinctive form of working-class feminism, simultaneously pushing for equal rights and pay and affirming their need for special protections. Dorothy Sue Cobble shows how sexual and racial segregation persisted in wait work, but she rejects the idea that this was caused by employers' actions or the exclusionary policies of male trade unionists. Dishing It Out contends that the success of waitress unionism was due to several factors: waitresses, for the most part, had nontraditional family backgrounds, and most were primary wage-earners. Their close-knit occupational community and sex-separate union encouraged female assertiveness and a decidedly unromantic view of men and marriage. Cobble skillfully combines oral interviews and extensive archival records to show how waitresses adopted the basic tenets of male-dominated craft unions but rejected other aspects of male union culture. The result is a book that will expand our understanding of feminism and unionism by including the gender conscious perspectives of working women.

A New Labor Movement for the New Century

A New Labor Movement for the New Century PDF

Author: Gregory Mantsios

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 113652231X

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This collection of original essays offers an inside view of the current state of American unions. Most of the contributors are prominent activists in the AFL-CIO, and their writings assess the state of the movement in the late 1990s.

Organizing to Win

Organizing to Win PDF

Author: Kate Bronfenbrenner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780801484469

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As the American labour movement mobilizes for a major resurgence through new organizing, this text presents research on union organizing strategies. The introduction defines the context of the current climate and subsequent chapters include community-based organizing and building

Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations

Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations PDF

Author: David Lewin

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2010-03-04

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1849509336

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Presents a rich mix of different approaches in industrial relations scholarship covering labor history, theory, quantitative and qualitative analysis. This volume includes a range of papers that potentially has significant implications for labour research and policy.

Union Women

Union Women PDF

Author: Mary Margaret Fonow

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780816638833

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For more than a quarter century, steel mills in the United States and Canada have produced more than metal: they have produced a new kind of worker and union activist -- "Women of Steel." In an era labeled postfeminist and postindustrial, women have created spaces in this quintessentially male-dominated workforce from which to mobilize for their rights as women and workers. In Union Women, Mary Margaret Fonow captures the stories of the women of the United Steelworkers. She focuses on a tenacious group who used their developing power in the union to challenge sex discrimination and to advocate for women's rights, and applied their transnational resources to construct a feminist response to globalization and economic restructuring. In the process, they have transformed the organizations, resources, and networks of both the labor and women's movements, and have in turn transformed themselves into feminists. In Union Women Fonow uses statistical, archival, and ethnographic research methods to provide a broad historical account of women in the steel industry. Fonow's sweeping approach allows her to examine several key issues in social movement, feminist, and political theory, and to show that insights from these fields shape each other. She explores how social movements are gendered, how working-class women develop a feminist consciousness, and how this process is informed by intersecting demands of race, class, and gender. As a comparative, cross-national study, Union Women also demonstrates how different political and social cultures affect women's organizing and strategic decisions. Finally, Fonow emphasizes that economic restructuring and globalization pose immediate challenges forwomen as laborers and activists, and that, in order to survive, all unions must develop organizing and mobilization strategies informed by feminism and other social movements.