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Building Power from Below analyzes the success of Walmart workers in Chile. Retail and warehouse workers have achieved the seemingly unachievable. They have organized Walmart. How do we explain workers’ success in Chile, the cradle of neoliberalism, in challenging the world’s largest and most antiunion corporation? Chilean workers have spent years building grass roots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. While both retail and warehouse workers have successful unions, they have built different organizations due to their industry, workforce, and political histories. The independent retail worker unions are best characterized by what I call flexible militancy. These unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. While they have made notable bread and butter gains, their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have significant structural power. Their unions are best characterized by what I call strategic democracy. Their structural power has offered them the opportunity to “map production” and build strategic capacity. They have been especially successful in economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can certainly gain insights from their approaches, tactics, and strategies.

Over the past few decades, shrimp has transformed from a luxury food to a kitchen staple. While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp fishers have suffered, particularly in Louisiana. Most of the shrimp that we eat today is imported from shrimp farms in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The flood of imported shrimp has sent dockside prices plummeting, and rising fuel costs have destroyed the profit margin for shrimp fishing as a domestic industry. This book portrays the struggles that Louisiana shrimp fishers endure to remain afloat in an industry beset by globalization. The book offers a portrait of shrimp fishers' lives just before the BP oil spill in 2010, which helps us better understand what has happened since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It shows that shrimp fishers go through a careful calculation of noneconomic costs and benefits as they grapple to figure out what their next move will be. Many willingly forgo opportunities in other industries to fulfill what they perceive as their cultural calling. Others reluctantly leave fishing behind for more lucrative work, but they mourn the loss of a livelihood upon which community and family structures are built. In this account of the struggle to survive amid the waves of globalization, the book focuses the analysis at the intersection of livelihood, family, and community and casts a bright light upon the cultural importance of the work that we do.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.7 million home health aides and personal and home care aides in the United States as of 2008. These home care aides are rapidly becoming the backbone of America's system of long-term care, and their numbers continue to grow. Often referred to as frontline care providers or direct care workers, home care aides—disproportionately women of color—bathe, feed, and offer companionship to the elderly and disabled in the context of the home. This book draws on observations of and interviews with aides working in Ohio and California to explore the physical and emotional labor associated with the care of others. Aides experience material hardships and find themselves negotiating social norms and affective rules associated with both family and work. This has negative implications for workers who struggle to establish clear limits on their emotional labor in the intimate space of the home. Aides often find themselves giving more, staying longer, even paying out of pocket for patient medications or incidentals; in other words, they feel emotional obligations expected more often of family members than of employees. However, there are also positive outcomes: some aides form meaningful ties to elderly and disabled patients. This sense of connection allows them to establish a sense of dignity and social worth in a socially devalued job. The case of home care allows us to see the ways in which emotional labor can simultaneously have deleterious and empowering consequences for workers.

This is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming. The book describes a world whose enormous profitability is dependent on the labor of women assigned stereotypically female occupations. But behind the neon lies another world, peopled by thousands of remarkable women who assert their humanity in the face of gaming empires' relentless quest for profits. The casino women profiled here generally fall into two groups. Geoconda Arguello Kline, typical of the first, arrived in the United States in the 1980s fleeing the war in Nicaragua. Finding work as a Las Vegas hotel maid, she overcame her initial fear of organizing and joined with others to build the preeminent grassroots union in the nation—the 60,000-member Culinary Union—becoming in time its president. In Las Vegas, “the hottest union city in America,” the collective actions of union activists have won economic and political power for tens of thousands of working Nevadans and their families. The story of these women's transformation and their success in creating a union able to face off against global gaming giants forms the centerpiece of this book. Another group of women, dealers and middle managers among them, did not act. Fearful of losing their jobs, they remained silent, declining to speak out when others were abused, and in the case of middle managers, taking on the corporations' goals as their own. The book appraises the cost of their silence and examines the factors that pushed some women into activism and led others to accept the status quo.

Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated layoffs have become part of working life. This book finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, the book shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent “companies of one.” Following the experiences of individual jobseekers over time, the book explores the central role that organized networking events, working spouses, and neoliberal ideology play in forging and reinforcing a new individualist, pro-market response to the increasingly insecure nature of contemporary employment. It also explores how this new perspective is transforming traditional ideas about masculinity and the role of men as breadwinners. Sympathetic to the benefits that this “company of one” ideology can hold for its adherents, the book also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely.

The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. This book contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong labor unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains. The book's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. The research found that German managers more often took the “high road” than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. The book traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. The book's findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the United States Department of Agriculture continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. This book reveals a history of cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. The separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support. Nongovernmental organizations played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.

News about labor unions is usually pessimistic, focusing on declining membership and failed campaigns. But there are encouraging signs that the labor movement is evolving its strategies to benefit workers in rapidly changing global economic conditions. This book tells the story of the most successful and aggressive campaign ever waged by workers across national borders. It begins in the United States in 2007 as Service Employees International Union's (SEIU) struggled to organize private security guards at Group 4 Securicor (G4S), a global security services company that is the second largest employer in the world. Failing in its bid, SEIU changed course and sought allies in other countries in which G4S operated. Its efforts resulted in wage gains, benefits increases, new union formations, and an end to management reprisals in many countries throughout the Global South, though close attention is focused on developments in South Africa and India. The book looks beyond these achievements to probe the meaning of some of the less visible aspects of the campaign. The book reveals several paradoxes. Although global unionism is typically concerned with creating parity and universal standards across borders, local context can both undermine and empower the intentions of global actors, creating varied and uneven results. At the same time, despite being generally regarded as weaker than their European counterparts, U.S. unions are in the process of remaking the global labor movement in their own image. The book suggests that changes in political economy have encouraged unions to develop new ways to organize workers.

This book examines headhunting—contingency recruiting—in the wake of two profound changes in the labor market. The first is the emergence and explosive rise of various forms of social media, most prominently LinkedIn, which have made information about employers, jobs, and job-seekers much more widely available. The second is the unraveling of internal labor markets and the fraying of the ties between employers and employees, which started in the 1980s and 1990s, and accelerated in the wake of the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the Great Recession. Both changes created the possibility that employers and candidates would be able to find each other without the benefit of labor-market intermediaries like headhunters. The book explains why headhunting survived these changes: employers still need headhunters to find good candidates quickly. In a high-tech world, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified prospective candidates. Headhunters, however, determine which of these prospects are truly viable candidates and they invest time and effort in converting prospects into candidates. They bring high-touch search to a high-tech labor market.

This book analyzes worker organizing and union revitalization following the decline of neocorporatism, the transformation of industrial relations and the rise of neoliberalism. Given labor’s critical role in the Zionist state-building project, it also discusses organized labor’s relationship to the political community in light of Israel’s complex relations with the Palestinians. The book asserts that despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, undermined by political and economic elites, the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the neocorporatist regime. Moreover, workers are taking advantage of vestigial neocorporatist frameworks and new liberal legislation to impede neoliberal policies and renegotiate union democracy. However, the common political framework between labor and capital, the nation-state, has been subverted: capital has spread beyond “national” borders and labor has been brought into them from outside, entirely annulling labor Zionism’s premise in which “the (Hebrew) worker” was almost synonymous with “citizen.” Organized labor has lost its legitimacy. As even the right to organize is challenged, labor fights a rearguard battle, renegotiating its status vis-à-vis “old” social partners and a public which, for the most part, does not identify itself as “workers” and does not accept labor’s claim to represent it.

This book envisions a genuine, universal world of workplace flexibility that helps mothers who stay at home, those who work part time, and those who work full time balance their commitments to their jobs and their families. Achieving this goal, the book argues, will require a broad-based movement that harnesses the energy of existing organizations of mothers that already support workplace flexibility in their own ways. The book examines the efforts of five diverse national mothers' organizations: Mocha Moms, which aims to assist mothers of color; Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS), which stresses the promotion of Christian values; Mothers & More, which emphasizes support for those moving in and out of the paid workforce; MomsRising, which focuses on online political advocacy; and the National Association of Mothers' Centers (NAMC), which highlights community-based networking. After a detailed account of the history, membership profiles, strategies, and successes of each of these organizations, the book suggests actions that will allow greater workplace flexibility to become a viable reality and points to many opportunities to promote intergroup mobilization and unite mothers once and for all.

This book provides an in-depth look at the rise of women-only unions in Japan, an organizational analysis of the challenges these new unions face in practice, and a first-hand account of the ambitious, occasionally contentious, and ultimately successful international solidarity project that helped to spark a new feminist labor movement. In the early 1990s, as part of a larger wave of union reform efforts in Japan, women began creating their own women-only labor unions to confront long-standing gender inequality in the workplace and in traditional enterprise unions. These new unions soon discovered that the demand for individual assistance and help at the bargaining table dramatically exceeded the rate at which the unions could recruit and train members to meet that demand. Within just a few years, women-only unions were proving to be both the most effective option women had for addressing problems on the job and in serious danger of dying out because of their inability to grow their organizational capacity. The author met up with Japanese women's unions at a critical moment in their struggle to survive. They teamed up to host a multiyear international exchange project that brought together American and Japanese activists and scholars to investigate the links between organizational structure and the day-to-day problems non-traditional unions face, and to develop Japan-specific participatory labor education. They also gained valuable insights into the art of building and maintaining the kinds of collaborative, cross-border relationships that are essential to today's social justice movements.

Transnational customer service workers are an emerging touchstone of globalization given their location at the intersecting borders of identity, class, nation, and production. Unlike outsourced manufacturing jobs, call center work requires voice-to-voice conversation with distant customers; part of the product being exchanged in these interactions is a responsive, caring, connected self. This book explores the experiences of the men and women who work in Indian call centers through one hundred interviews with workers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Pune. As capital crosses national borders, colonial histories and racial hierarchies become inextricably intertwined. As a result, call center workers in India need to imagine themselves in the eyes of their Western clients—to represent themselves both as foreign workers who do not threaten Western jobs and as being “just like” their customers in the West. In order to become these imagined ideal workers, they must be believable and authentic in their emulation of this ideal. In conversation with Western clients, Indian customer service agents proclaim their legitimacy, an effort the book calls “authenticity work,” which involves establishing familiarity in light of expectations of difference. In their daily interactions with customers, managers and trainers, Indian call center workers reflect and reenact a complex interplay of colonial histories, gender practices, class relations, and national interests.

This book makes four important contributions to our understanding of U.S. labor law and policy. First, given my previous three volume study of the work of the NLRB, this book is able to discuss the Board’s path under Chairmen Gould, Truesdale, Battista and Liebman in historical context. Second, this book demonstrates the consequences of applying different and conflicting values to real world issues of labor law. Third, the book’s inward assessment of U.S. labor law and policy using international human rights principles as standards for judgment constitutes new perspectives on old issues. These new perspectives challenge the commonly held view among practitioners and academics that workers’ organizing and collective bargaining are merely tests of economic power by adversarial interest groups exercising commercial rights not human rights. Finally, rather than joining those writing obituaries for the Act and the NLRB, this book maintains, despite the unrelenting pounding of hostile forces, that the core of the Act remains a solid foundation for the realization of workers’ rights–but calls for a new more creative vision because more is needed than merely fine tuning for marginal adjustments.

This book examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. It shows how workers make often grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, the book draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life. Music, the book argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The book highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, the book also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.

The number of women in positions of power and authority in Japanese companies has remained small despite the increase in the number of educated women and the passage of legislation on gender equality. This book draws on theoretical insights regarding Japan's coordinated capitalism and institutional stasis to challenge claims that the surge in women's education and employment will logically lead to the decline of gender inequality and eventually improve women's status in the Japanese workplace. The author's interviews with diverse groups of workers at three Japanese financial companies and two cosmetics companies in Tokyo reveal the persistence of vertical sex segregation as a cost-saving measure by Japanese companies. Women's advancement is impeded by customs including seniority pay and promotion, track-based hiring of women, long working hours, and the absence of women leaders. The book contends that an improvement in gender equality in the corporate system will require that Japan fundamentally depart from its postwar methods of business management. Only when the static labor market is revitalized through adoption of new systems of cost savings, employee hiring, and rewards will Japanese women advance in their chosen professions. Comparison with the situation in the United States makes the author's analysis of the Japanese case relevant for understanding the dynamics of the glass ceiling in US workplaces as well.

This book argues that the civic duty to perform paid work in contemporary society undermines freedom and justice. While workplace flexibility and the unconditional basic income (UBI) both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also harbor the risk of shoring up the work society. To avert this danger, we must therefore reconfigure the value and place of paid work in our lives. Moreover, we need to rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level, and in particular, abandon the view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. This task raises significant challenges, but Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on the “inoperative community” provides key philosophical guidance. Since the relational ontology of this alternative view of community stands in stark tension with capitalism, a liberal-reformist approach to lessening the burden of paid work that fails to tackle the underlying economic and social structure offers only limited gains in terms of freedom and justice. Moving beyond the work society and more fully realizing freedom and justice therefore entails nothing short of a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism.

Bike messengers are familiar figures in the downtown cores of major cities. Tasked with delivering time-sensitive materials within, they ride in all types of weather, weave in and out of dense traffic, dodging taxis and pedestrians alike in order to meet tight deadlines. Riding through midtown traffic at breakneck speeds is dangerous work, and most riders do it for very little pay and few benefits. As the courier industry has felt the pressures of first fax machines, then e-mails, and finally increased opportunities for electronic filing of legal “paperwork,” many of those who remain in the business are devoted to their job. For these couriers, messengering is the foundation for an all-encompassing lifestyle. This book introduces this messenger subculture, exploring its appeal as well as its uncertainties and dangers. The book shows how many become acclimated to the fast-paced, death-defying nature of the job, often continuing to ride with the same sense of purpose off the clock. In chaotic bike races called alleycats, messengers careen through the city in hopes of beating their peers to the finish line. Some messengers travel the world to take part in these events, and the top prizes are often little more than bragging rights. The work of bike messengers is intense and physically difficult. It requires split-second reflexes, an intimate knowledge of street maps and traffic patterns, and a significant measure of courage in the face of both bodily harm and job insecurity.

This book is a nonfiction narrative grounded in the day-by-day, hour-by-hour rhythms of an intensive care unit (ICU) in a teaching hospital in the heart of New Mexico. It takes place over a thirteen-week period, the time of the average rotation of residents through the ICU. It is the story of patients and families, suddenly faced with critical illness, who find themselves in the ICU. The book describes how they navigate through it and find their way, acting as a sensitive witness to the quiet courage and resourcefulness of ordinary people. The book leads the reader into a parallel world: the world of illness. This world, invisible but not hidden, not articulated by but known by the ill, does not readily offer itself to our understanding. In this context, the book reflects on the nature of medicine and nursing, on how doctors and nurses see themselves and how they see each other. Drawing on the words of medical historians, doctor-writers, and nursing scholars, the book examines the relationship of professional and lay observers to the meaning of illness, empathy, caring, and the silence of suffering. In doing so, the book offers up an intimate portrait of the ICU and its inhabitants.

When unions undertake labor organizing campaigns, they often do so from strong moral positions, contrasting workers’ rights to decent pay or better working conditions with the more venal financial motives of management. But how does labor confront management when management itself has moral legitimacy? This book tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California. The book explores how both union leaders and hospital leaders sought to show they were upholding the Catholic “mission” of the hospital against a market represented by the other. Ultimately, hospital workers and union leaders were able to reinterpret Catholic values in ways that supported their efforts to organize. More generally, the book argues that unions must weave together economic and cultural power in order to ensure their continued relevancy in the post-industrial world. In addition to advocating for workers’ economic interests, unions must engage with workers’ emotional investments in their work, must contend with the kind of moral authority that Santa Rosa Hospital leaders exerted to dissuade workers from organizing, and must connect labor’s project to broader conceptions of the public good.