Conference on Union Democracy Reexamined |
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Co-sponsored by Politics & Society February 24 & 25, 2006 Directions to Mary Gates Hall, UW Seattle (Click Here) Attendees requiring disability services (Click Here) Contact Jon Agnone agnone@u.washington.edu with any questions. |
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Full program schedule, including participants, titles of their talks, and their bios is available below, and as a PDF (Click Here).
Friday February 24, 2006 241 Mary Gates Hall 2:00-3:30 p.m. Roundtable: Union Democracy in the U.S. Presenters: 3:45-5:15 p.m. Presenters:
Plenary Address Saturday February 25, 2005 241 Mary Gates Hall 9:00 a.m. 9:15-10:45 a.m. “Union Democracy and the ILWU.” “Waterfront Unionism in Seattle and Tacoma, 1887-1958” “Ages, Regions, Finances and Efficiencies: Three Constitutional Amendments and their Effects upon ILWU Democracy.” Discussant: 11:00 a.m. -12:30 p.m. “Does Union Democracy Affect Organising Strategies? “Union Democracy and the Incorporation of Marginalized Workers in U.S. Unions.” “Path-Dependent Democracy: How Union Politics Affect Subsequent Membership Gains.” “Democratic Competition and Union Growth.” Discussant: 12:30-2:00 pm 2:00-3:30 p.m. “Who Sits at the Table in the House of Labor?: Rank-and-file Citizenship in Union Confederations.” “Union Democracy and the Italian Labor Movement” “Democratic and Social Movement Oriented? Not in Corporatist Europe.” “Union Democracy: Processes, Difficulties and Prospects.” Discussant: 3:45-5:15 p.m. “The Rise and Decline of a Democratic Organizational Culture in the South African Labor Movement, 1973-2000.” “Staff Driven Democratization: Organizing and Organizational Change in HERE.” “State Coercion and the Rise of U.S. Business Unionism: The Counterfactual Case of Minneapolis Teamsters, 1934-1941.” “The Lenin Problem: Organizational Cultures and Preference Formation.” Discussant:
Participant Biographies John Ahlquist is a PhD student in the department of political science at the University of Washington and a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. John is affiliated with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and is currently completing a dissertation examining the organizational structure of labor union confederations. Lucio Baccaro is Assistant Professor in the Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER), MIT, and senior research officer (on leave) at the International Institute for Labour Studies, ILO, in Geneva. His research has so far focused on the impact of internal decision-making processes on collective choices, on deliberation as a coordination mechanism, on participatory governance institutions involving not just the traditional social partners (government, labor , and capital) but also NGOs and civil society organizations, and on the transformation of neo-corporatist systems. He has conducted field research in Italy, Ireland, South Africa, and South Korea. His current research interest is to understand the determinants of multinational companies’ responses to civil society activism. Nowell Bamberger is a student at the University of Washington School of Law. He has a B.A. in Political Science from UW, with minors in Labor Studies and Human Rights. Nowell became involved in the Union Democracy Reexamined Project in 2004 as a research assistant to Professors David Olson and Margaret Levi. His paper, "Waterfront Unionism in Seattle and Tacoma, 1887-1958," was the 2005 recipient of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies' "Best Undergraduate Paper" prize. Elaine Bernard is Executive Director of the Trade Union Program at Harvard University. Bernard is a lively and popular lecturer who has conducted courses on a wide variety of topics for unions, community groups, universities and government departments in the United States, Canada, South America, Japan, South Africa, Australia and many countries in Eastern and Western Europe. Her current research and teaching interests are in the area of international comparative labor movements, and the role of unions in promoting civil society, democracy and economic growth. Recent talks and publications include: "What's Wrong and What's Right with the US Economy," "Why Unions Matter," "Public Sector Workers in Reinventing Government," "What's the Matter with NAFTA," "The Way to the Future: Setting a Social Agenda for Labor," "Strategic Planning for Trade Unionists," "Social Unionism: Labor as a Political Force," "Why Health Care Should Not Be A Business." Sakhela Buhlungu teaches sociology and is a deputy director of the Sociology of Work Unit (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. After working as a full-time union official in the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked as a writer for the union magazine, The Shopsteward, and as a regular contributor to, and editorial board member of the South African Labour Bulletin. His PhD was on the changing role of full-time union officials in the black South African unions that emerged after the historic Durban strikes of 1973. He has published widely on labor and labor activism and is an editorial board member of the South African Sociological Review and Labor History. Barry Eidlin is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research seeks to understand processes of political and organizational change, focusing in particular on the role that internal organizational dynamics and state actors play in creating and constraining those change processes. Prior to pursuing graduate study, Eidlin was an activist in the union democracy movement as a staff organizer for Detroit-based Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the 30 year-old rank and file reform movement inside the Teamsters Union. Peter Fairbrother is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. He researches on labour, trade unionism, and state restructuring. His recent work has been concerned with arguments about trade union renewal. He has published on trade unionism for many years, including All Those in Favour: The Politics of Union Democracy (Pluto, 1984); Unions at the Crossroads (Mansell, 2000); Changing Patterns Of Trade Unionism: Comparisons Between Six Countries, (with Gerard Griffin, Continuum 2002) and Trade Unions in Renewal (with Charlotte Yates¸ Routledge, 2003) as well as many articles. His work focuses on Australia, Britain and a range of countries in the European Union. Earlier work focused on Russia just after the end of the Soviet bloc, focusing on the nascent independent unions. He published What About the Workers? (with Simon Clarke, Michael Burawoy and Pavel Krotov, Verso, 1993) and The Workers’ Movement in Russia (with Simon Clarke and Vadim Borisov, Edward Elgar, 1995). He has worked with trade unions and for trade unions, producing reports and related publications, as well as contributing to union education courses. Antonina Gentile is a PhD Candidate in Dept of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, and a member of Cornell's Transnational Contention Project. She previously worked as a broadcast journalist and documentary maker for Australian broadcasting, was founding Manager of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney, and in an even earlier life, worked in community development in Australia. Devin Kelly is a first year graduate student in the department of Sociology at the University of Washington. His areas of academic interest include labor studies, social movement theory, globalization and social change. He is also an activist who has worked extensively in labor organizing (primarily with migrant farm workers) and with numerous other community-based organizations around the Northwest. Margaret Levi is Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies, Political Science, University of Washington. She is the immediate past president of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Among her numerous publications is the multi-authored Democracy at Risk (Brookings, 2005), which recommends reforms to facilitate labor organizing. As the Bridges Chair and Director of the UW Center for Labor Studies, 1996-2000, Levi initiated the UW’s “Teach-In on the Future of Labor," and co-directed the WTO Protest History Project. She has held positions at institutions throughout the world. She is the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics and of the Annual Review of Political Science. Her current and comparative research on the relationship between union organizational culture and social justice commitments is funded by the National Science Foundation. Maria Victoria Murillo is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs. She is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America(Cambridge University Press 2001) and co-editor of Argentine Democracy: the Politics of Institutional Weakness (Pennsylvania State University Press 2006). She has published numerous articles on Latin American labor unions, labor reforms, teachers and education reform. She was the coordinator of a research network on Latin American teachers' unions that promoted dialogue between teachers and other actors around issues of education reform. David Olson is Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies Emeritus at the University of Washington. He founded the Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington and was the inaugural holder of the Bridges Chair, the only endowed chair named for a labor leader at universities in the world. Olson's research focuses on the extent and character of democratic practice within trade and industrial unions and the effects of different forms of rule internal to unions. Andrew Richards is professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Juan March Institute, Madrid. He has contributed chapters to Unemployment in the New Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Can Class Still Unite? The Differentiated Work Force, Class Solidarity and Trade Unions (Ashgate, 2001), and is the author of Miners on Strike: Class Solidarity and Division in Britain (Berg, 1996). The latter is a study of the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain, based on 217 interviews with rank and file miners in the South Wales, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalfields. Teresa Sharpe is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her paper on democratic practices in HERE is part of a larger dissertation on the revitalization of the American Labor Movement. Through a comparison of HERE, SEIU, AFSCME and the UFCW, her dissertation investigates why change in the labor movement happened when and where it did. Teresa has worked for the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute and the SEIU, and she was a member of the Organizing Committee of a successful HERE local organizing campaign. Caleb Southworth is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written articles on historical class formation in the United States, including the geography of class, religion and class formation and the effect of agrarian social movements on the welfare state. He has also conducted extensive fieldwork in factories in Russia and Ukraine and written on household agriculture and labor market participation in the post-Soviet world. He was news editor at the Detroit Metro Times. Judith Stepan-Norris is Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on unions, politics, and community, with considerable attention to the issue of union democracy. She has published two books (Talking Union and Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions, both with Maurice Zeitlin) and several articles on these topics. She is currently engaged in a project on the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer organizing program (with Leslie Bunnage), and another on the Los Angeles Renters movement of the 1970s (with Ben Lind). She is also Co-Editor of Contemporary Sociology. Patrick Troy is Emeritus Professor of Urban Research at Australian National University. His research focuses on housing, urban planning, infrastructure investment, environmental quality and social justice. A political/social activist with a main interest in social justice, he has been a union member for 52 years initially in the building industry, engineering and more recently tertiary education. Kim Voss is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. She studies labor, work, social movements, and comparative-historical sociology. Her recent work explores the politics of the contemporary American labor movement, and particularly the prospects for its renewal. She has published two books about U.S. labor today: Hard Work: Remaking the America Labor Movement (with Rick Fantasia, University of California Press 2004) and Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (co-edited with Ruth Milkman, Cornell University Press 2004), along with several articles. In earlier work, Professor Voss studied the Knights of Labor--the largest American union organization of the nineteenth-century--to shed light on the question of why the U.S. labor movement has traditionally been so weak and politically conservative in comparison to labor movements in Western Europe. Dorian T. Warren is a Post-Doctoral Scholar and Visiting Faculty at The Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Warren is a member of the Chicago Workers’ Rights Board, the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies, and has also worked with several national and local unions including UNITE-HERE, SEIU, United Steelworkers of America, and Chicago Jobs with Justice. Joseph Wenzl has been a member of the ILWU for twenty-five years. He was registered in Seattle in 1980 and became "A"-registered into Local 19 in 1987. Joseph's family history closely mirrors that of the ILWU: he is the third generation of longshoremen in his family, and his great uncle--a charter member of Local 19--participated in the famous West Coast/Waterfront Strike of 1934. Joseph attended the University of Washington in Seattle and is currently a member of the University's Visiting Committee of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the only union-endowed chair of its kind at an American university. He has served as an occasional guest-lecturer in the University's Political Science Department.
Elaine Bernard Executive Director, Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School Saturday: 7:30pm in Mary Gates Hall 389 Description of Elaine Bernard’s talk: Few people today remember that when the National Labor Relations Act was adopted by Congress in 1935, its purpose was not simply to provide a procedural mechanism to end industrial strife in the workplace. Rather, this New Deal legislation had a far more ambitious mission: to promote industrial democracy. Today’s worksite, however, is a place where workers learn that they have few rights to participate in decisions that affect them and their community. Even the much toted “new work systems” while claiming to “empower” workers, remain at best, forms of benevolent dictatorship – subject to the whim of management which sets the parameters and controls the participation. Most American workers spend eight or more hours a day obeying orders and accepting that they have no rights, legal or otherwise, to participate in important decisions that affect them. And then they are expected to engage in robust, critical dialogue about the structure of our society -- after hours. Eventually the strain of being deferential servants from nine to five diminishes our after-hours liberty and sense of civic entitlement and responsibility. We face a grave challenge to democracy. Increasingly business and government are seeking to minimize and marginalize the role of democratic decision-making and public governance and to seek to substitute markets and market competition for democratic decision-making. Unions need to be in the forefront of the battle to make sure that the market does not replace democratic social decision-making. The cause of unions in the 21st century reaches far beyond their own survival. Because labor has not succeeded in extending democracy to the workplace, democracy and civil society themselves are threatened. The labor movement cannot be seen in isolation from this political environment, and any revitalization of unions will require an effective response and reinvigoration of democracy. Unions must move from “contracts ‘R us,” narrow service organizations for their members, to the creators of democratic communities -- in the workplace and beyond. |
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