Search results

As of 1982, federal credit unions were allowed to add select employee groups and thus create institutions with multiple-group common bonds. We examine the efficiency of single bond and multiple bond federal-chartered credit unions by using data envelopment analysis (DEA), a non-parametric, linear programming methodology. Results indicate that multiple bond credit unions have better pure technical efficiency than single bond credit unions. However, single bond credit unions appear to be more scale efficient than the multiple bond credit unions. Our results also indicate that members of multiple bond credit unions may derive greater wealth gains than members of single bond credit unions.

Unions and worker cooperatives have long represented distinct approaches to building worker voice. This paper draws from observations of the work of the “Co-op Exploratory Committee” of 1199SEIU, the nation’s largest union local, which is seeking to expand the development of unionized worker cooperatives. Described by Martin Luther King, Jr, as his “favorite” union, 1199SEIU has a storied history of organizing frontline healthcare workers and includes large numbers of women of color and immigrant workers among its membership. Since 2003, it has also represented workers at Cooperative Home Care Associates, the nation’s largest worker cooperative. Drawing from discussions among union officials, co-op leaders, and rank-and-file union members about the potential role of unionized worker cooperatives within the labor movement, the paper examines the creative tension between stakeholder and democratic logics in efforts to expand this model. It argues that continued union decline, heightened interest in economic alternatives, and systemic frailties exposed by Covid-19 may create new opportunities for building unionized worker co-ops at scale.

Soon after Dal Lawrence became the first president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers (TFT) in 1967, he began an effort to expand the union’s role in teachers’ evaluations. Throughout most of the 1970s, the union pressed for greater job protection as well as a peer evaluation program for new teachers; a proposal that the school district refused repeatedly over that decade. In the 1981 contract negotiation, however, the district declared itself willing to include the issue, provided that the union would consider an intervention program for nonperforming teachers. This agreement – now in its third decade, despite a number of conflicts between the district and the union over the years – provided a framework for a totally new process of teacher assessment based on peer evaluation, the Toledo Plan (American Educator, 1984; Bradley, 1998b; Lawton, 1996). In the Toledo Plan, for the first time, teachers would be evaluating each other’s work, with real consequences for those who were not able to successfully meet agreed-upon expectations. “The idea of a teacher union evaluating members of its own bargaining unit was so controversial,” noted Gallegher, Lanier, and Kerchner (1993), “that the TFT president Dal Lawrence waited several months before telling a shocked American Federation of Teachers (AFT) executive council what he had done” (p. 158).

Certain features of collective bargaining have, over time, promoted uniformity and sometimes inflexibility in teacher policy and negotiated contracts. From the start, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) – passed in 1935 to regulate unionization and collective bargaining in the private, industrial sector – served as the template for state labor laws regulating education. The framers of the NLRA never had the needs of the public sector or schools in mind. Yet the 35 states that now require collective bargaining for teachers have drawn on the NLRA’s procedures and standards. For example, they have used the NLRA for defining how teachers organize and are represented; what constitutes an unfair labor practice; and how obligatory membership or dues provide union security (e.g. agency shop, union shop). They have also drawn on the NLRA to define what range of issues can be bargained; whether strikes are legal; and what processes are used to resolve an impasse (e.g. mediation, fact finding, binding arbitration, or all three).¹ Although the laws of the 35 states show some important variations, their similarity is more striking than their differences. Jessup (1985) concluded that the narrow scope of bargaining established by New York’s Taylor Law “severely restricted the range of concerns teachers could productively bring to the bargaining table” (p. 195).

Despite the volumes that have been written on America's correctional crisis – the peerless incarceration rate, disproportionate confinement of minority group members and democratically untenable policies of disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions – criminal justice policy has changed little within the past decade or more. An important voice has been left out of these correctional policy formulations – that of prisoners. This paper proposes convict labor unions as one way to address this issue. It utilizes the United States Supreme Court majority's arguments in Jones v. North Carolina to assess the feasibility of inmate labor unions in light of current federal, state and local institutional operations; and provides a very tentative outline of how a prisoners’ labor union could be structured and function – exploring the potential democratic ramifications of such unions for corrections and in broader social policy.

We present evidence regarding how a card check recognition process affects the labor relations climate during the period preceding recognition and that which immediately follows. Interviews with managers, interviews with union representatives, and surveys of workers indicate that card check typically results in a less prolonged, costly, and stressful recognition and negotiations process. Although the resulting contracts are often similar to those in other parts of a heavily unionized corporation, sometimes they reflect a different business context – and hence are somewhat more favorable to employers without being substantially less favorable to employees. This reality is reflected in the positive reaction of the U.S. stock markets to union recognition by an employer through a card check process. Employers make card check agreements primarily for business reasons, and investors respect their judgment as to the impact of such agreements on the bottom line.

According to Friedrich A. von Hayek, trade unions are the primary problem of our times. They coerce employers into raising the wages, and they seek privileges in the political sphere. This harsh judgement is, however, not fully justified by Hayek's own theory of action and order. In addition to some terminological difficulties, he undervalues his insights – developed and applied elsewhere – of competition as a discovery process and of locally available knowledge when it comes to unions. Following this lead, further functions of trade unions apart from their monopoly face appear: trade unions channel information and develop rules for conflict resolution; they are part of a process of preference formulation and opinion formation.

Over the past few decades, the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) has become one of the most controversial and politicized divisions of the Department of Labor. Republic and Democratic Administrations have adopted starkly different practices concerning both the allocation of resources and the focus of regulatory activities at the division. These differences have been brought into sharp focus during the Bush II and Obama Administrations. Under the Bush Administration, funding for OLMS increased significantly, and the DOL revised union financial reporting requirements, imposing a more onerous burden on unions in the name of promoting transparency and accountability. Section 1 of this paper provides a summary and analysis of the most significant changes and innovations at the OLMS under the Obama Administration. Section 2 of the paper provides a detailed summary of the Bush era reforms and their fate under the Obama OLMS, and an analysis of the impact of these reforms in the area of increasing union transparency and accountability. It argues that the Bush reforms did little or nothing to achieve greater accountability and may instead have been motivated largely by a desire to impose a more onerous administrative burden on reporting unions.

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.