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The U.S. labor movement is in decline and a crisis of national leadership has emerged over conflicting prescriptions for labor's revival. Union leaders have seemingly established consensus on the need for change, but disagree about the nature of needed reform, and methods for accomplishing meaningful changes that might address the long-term crisis.

This paper strives to inform and advance debates on these issues. Two national union surveys conducted in 1990 and 1997 provide the primary evidentiary base. Given their critical role in this study, measures from the surveys and certain aspects of the surveys are scrutinized. These surveys span the “Sweeney Insurgency” and the early years of the Sweeney AFL-CIO administration. Although both surveys have supported previous cross-section based studies, no published work has expressly focused on the change and stability within national unions or the longitudinal potential these data collectively provide. Using this potential to reexamine relations between union structures, strategies, and performance, this paper seeks to establish an evidentiary base to inform the current debate about union reforms and their likely consequences. In addition, suggestions for future research on unions and approaches to studying unions are offered.

Although the study of unions and their effects has a long history, only recently have researchers begun to analyze unions as organizations. In such studies, the union itself is a focus, rather than its effects or the behavior of individuals in relation to unions. Some key topics include union environments, goals, strategies, structures, and outcomes, including innovation and effectiveness. This paper reviews recent research in order to summarize current knowledge on national unions as organizations, and offers suggestions for further research. Particular attention is devoted to national unions, as they occupy a critical place in the network of union organizations. U.S. unions have faced serious challenges in recent decades, and their efforts to cope with these and adapt to their changing environments may have lessons for the study of organizations more generally.

Volume 15 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains 10 papers, four of which deal with human resource management and six with unionization. Six of the papers were originally presented in “Best Papers” sessions at the 57th and 58th annual meetings of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). In keeping with AILR's global perspective and global sourcing of leading research, the studies contained in these papers draw on data from the United Kingdom, France, Asia, Canada, and the United States.

The question of why workers support unions is one of the most fundamental in employment relations. Using Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior we conduct a selective review of literature and evidence on union voting, joining, and participation. We focus primarily on the question of motivation as stemming from self-interest or from pro-social considerations. Secondary attention is given to the influence of others’ views (subjective norms) and worker perceptions that they can achieve desired behaviors (perceived control or self-efficacy). We find support for the notion that workers are concerned with neither member self-interest (“just us”) alone, nor pro-social (“justice”) alone, but rather that they are motivated to form, join, and participate by both considerations. This micro-foundation for considering unions as institutions suggests that unions are neither narrow self-interested institutions nor purely pro-social movements, but “a little bit of both.” We offer propositions and consider implications for theory, practice, and future research.

This chapter reports the results of a 20-year longitudinal study of how American unions have adapted their internal administrative practices to meet the significant external challenges they face. In previous scholarly work, researchers have reported that the administrative practices of American unions were far more informal, ad hoc, and political than those of business, government, and other nonprofit organizations. The authors’ 2010 survey asked US-based national and international unions to provide data concerning their internal administrative practices. The results were compared with findings from similar surveys conducted in 1990 and 2000. The results of these surveys indicate a steady increase in unions’ adoption of more formal personnel policies, budget practices, strategic planning processes, and efforts to evaluate planned activities over the 20-year period studied. They also indicate that unions increasingly recruit individuals meeting college, technical, and professional qualifications. Taken together, the results suggest a recognition on the part of many unions that adapting their internal administrative practices to the new realities they face is a fundamental and a necessary part of any effort at organizational renewal.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and development of industrial relations as a field of study. This paper employs bibliometric and social network analyses to examine the scholarly work published in the top industrial relations journals over the past 40 years. By examining the citation and co-citation patterns at the journal level and the article level, it is possible to empirically describe the field of industrial relations in terms of its parameters and its “paradigms” – the generally agreed on sets of research questions and methodologies – at different time periods throughout its development. Our findings illustrate that the intellectual base of the industrial relations field has moved from a more traditional, applied labor economics view of industrial relations to a broader “employment relations” view of the field.

This paper uses two data sources to map trends in resource availability for trade unions in Britain. Union resources exist, on the one hand, in the form of subscription income and accumulated assets shown in union accounts and, on the other, establishment level resources secured from employers and union members. The paper documents a substantial decline in both the forms of union resource across the period 1990–2004 and attempts to explain both the reasons for this decline and its consequences for employee representation in Britain.

A “new” interpretation of Section 7 in the National Labor Relations Act could serve as the basis of union renewal, in enabling and supporting non-majority, non-exclusive representation as an alternative to the difficulties of union certification. One potential shortcoming of this form of representation is interunion conflict associated with ongoing competition between unions trying to attract each other's members in the same bargaining units. However, interview evidence collected from union executives in New Zealand, where non-majority, non-exclusive representation already exists, suggests that such conflict is normally limited. Focusing representation on areas that make the most sense (for both unions and workers) and following union federation protocols, when conflicts occur, have both contributed to the overall low conflict level. Lessons for US unionism are explored.

This chapter considers the provocative yet unexplored idea that a relationship exists between the nature by which a union wins recognition from an employer and the collective bargaining outcomes that are produced. Since at least the Ronald Reagan Administration, many trade, service and industrial unions in the United States have deployed alterative means to win recognition. Unions have negotiated a host of neutrality and card-check agreements as alternatives to petitioning for elections under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board. The use of these diverse organizing mechanisms has been well documented by numerous authors writing in the “union revitalization” genre, but what has not been done is the evaluation of the bargaining outcomes – effects – of different organizing tactics. The critical questions that have not been answered until now are, “What difference does it make how a union wins recognition?” Are the fortunes of newly organized union workers influenced by the way that they are brought into the labor movement? Based on a ten-year review of several successful union organizing cases, the findings from this chapter suggest that the key variable in gaining certification and ultimately a first contract is the ability of the union to leverage power and to do so in a timely manner.