Community Organizing and Employee Representation
| Author | Paul Osterman |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2006.00517.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
44:4 December 2006 0007– 1080 pp. 629– 649
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006December 2006444629649Special
Edition on New Actors in Industrial Relations
Community Organizing and Employee RepresentationBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
Paul Osterman is at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Boston.
Community Organizing and Employee
Representation
Paul Osterman
Abstract
The decline in the scope and power of American unions has led to a search for
new strategies and new organizational forms to better succeed in representing
the interests of employees in the labour market. This paper examines the role
of community-based organizations of the sort that proved so powerful during
the Civil Rights Movement. The subject of the paper is a strong national
network of community organizations that is neighbourhood-based and draws
heavily on churches and other community institutions. The organizations are put
together in neighbourhoods, yet they also wield power at the city and state levels.
The paper describes the organizations and examines and assesses their labour
market policies. The second part of the paper takes up organizational issues
and, in particular, describes how the structure and culture of these organizations
enable them to avoid some of the organizational perils that have befallen unions
and other social movement organizations. The paper concludes by comparing
these organizations with traditional unions and by discussing their prospects for
growth as well as their limitations.
1. Introduction
The decline in the scope and power of American unions has led to a search
for both new strategies and new organizational forms to better succeed in
representing the interests of employees and prospective employees in the
labour market. Within the context of unions themselves, innovations have
included union branded credit cards, minority unions (i.e. unions that do not
represent over fifty per cent of the workforce), greater emphasis on organizing,
and mergers and consolidations. Although there have been isolated examples
of success, union membership has continued its seemingly unrelenting decline.
At the same time that unions have struggled to reinvent themselves, there
has been considerable innovation outside the framework of traditional
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British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.
representation structures. For example, within large firms, affinity groups
organized around identity have emerged and pressed management for fair
treatment along a variety of dimensions, for example, gender equity or gay
rights (Piore and Safford 2005; Scully and Segal 2002). Another innovation
has been worker centres, which are organizations that provide a range of legal
services and political advocacy for people at the low end of the labour market
(Fine 2006). These have been particularly vigorous in immigrant communi-
ties. At the upper end of the labour market, professionals have organized
associations or guilds that seek to provide a range of services to their mem-
bers. Yet another example are efforts to establish non-profit temporary help
firms that enforce higher labour standards than are observed in the free
market (for a discussion of some of these developments, see Osterman
et al
.
2001).
The range of these initiatives is impressive and a fair conclusion might be
that in the vacuum created by a weakening traditional labour movement,
there has been a surge of creativity around new organizational forms and
strategies. However, at the same time, there are obvious weaknesses and
limitations to these efforts. Virtually all of these innovations are small-scale
and, although hard data are not available, they almost certainly affect only a
tiny slice of the labour market. Furthermore, they are isolated in the sense
that they typically are not part of a larger organization that can wield political
power. The linkage of local unions to a broader union movement has been
one of the important sources of union influence and power, yet this seems
absent in many of these newer efforts.
What then are other alternatives? One that leaps to mind is community-
based organizations of the sort that proved so powerful during the Civil
Rights Movement. Indeed, a strong national network of community organi-
zations has emerged in the United States in the past few decades and this
network is very active in representing employees and in engaging in political
action on their behalf. The network is neighbourhood-based and draws
heavily on churches and other community institutions. It is local in that the
organizations are, at least initially, put together in neighbourhoods, yet they
also wield power at the city and state levels.
This paper will examine the characteristics and achievements of this net-
work and draw conclusions about possible trajectories of employee represen-
tation. The central argument of the paper is that the network is effective in
its labour market strategies but, perhaps more importantly, offers a model for
addressing key internal challenges that have historically confronted social
movement organizations such as trade unions. Specifically, the network has
managed not only to maintain a strong authority structure but also to main-
tain high levels of member commitment and energy. It achieves this via a
particular approach towards internal leadership development and training.
In the next section, I will describe the nature of this network and how it
goes about organizing. I will then describe the labour market strategies of the
network. Following these two descriptive sections, I will assess the strengths
and weaknesses of this approach to employee representation and place these
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