Labor-Community Alliances

Web Sites & Blogs

• Community Unionism

Community unionism is used here in the context of unions seeking to reach out to the community. Resources on this site include:

1. A series of research papers on the topic of community unionism and union-community coalitions.
2. A series of diagrams and training documents prepared to train union and community organisers and members on how to develop effective community union practice.
3. An annotated bibliography of some articles found useful in defining and exploring community unionism.
4. Contact details and research areas of several key academics in USA, Canada, UK and Australia who are working on this important topic.

Organizations

• Grassroots Collaborative

Grassroots Collaborative unites eleven membership-based organizations in Illinois in order to create policy change on local and statewide levels.

• Baltimore Neighborhood Organizers Network

A collaboration of dozens of organizations in Baltimore.

• Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFÉ)

The Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (formerly Workers Rights Project) was started in Greenville in 1980 as a project of a North Carolina-based group, Southerners for Economic Justice (SEJ). SEJ had been formed in the mid 70s by civil rights leaders such as Julian Bond and Maynard Jackson who felt that newly-won civil rights were incomplete if people had little or no rights on the job.

• National Organizers Alliance

(See their Books to Support Building the Movement page.)

Articles

• Community-Labor Alliance Sparks South Carolina

ABSTRACT: On October 27, 1994, employees of the Melrose Resort, on South Carolina's Daufuskie Island, made history. They voted 98 to 45 to be represented by the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). With this vote, these workers became the first in the Hilton Head area to successfully organize and win union representation. In the South, where corporate control is still the dominant theme and less than 3 percent of the workforce is organized, the victory in Hilton Head was remarkable. The campaign that lead to the vote was also remarkable because it pulled together an alliance rarely seen in this part of the country—labor and community. In order to win the vote and survive the 16 months of contract negotiations that followed, the workers depended on the support of an unusual and very successful partnership forged between the union and the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFE).

• Building a Union-Community Alliance that Lasts

Workers and homeowners, union members and community activists—all had a reason to march against Bank of America this spring. In Lynn, Massachusetts, our protest was another step in building the relationship between unionized working people and working-class community organizations, especially among immigrants. It’s a relationship that the North Shore Labor Council has been carefully nurturing for years.

Papers

• Labor and Community Collaboration

Over the last decade, some unions have successfully undertaken collaborative broad-based organizing efforts, such as Los Angeles’ highly successful Justice for Janitors campaign, mobilizations to pass local living wage ordinances, and organized mass protests against global free trade policies. These trends reflect a growing realization of the strategic need to strengthen the collective voice of workers and their families through collaborative advocacy and organizing efforts that bring together organized labor and other sectors of civil society.

• There is Power in Coalition: A framework for assessing how and when union-community coalitions are effective and enhance union power

Proposals for union revitalisation suggest the importance of unions reaching out to the community and the formation of union-community coalitions. Yet, how this process of ‘reaching out’ can be most effective for building union power and advancing union renewal is little understood.

• Bringing the Community In: Possibilities for public sector union success through community unionism

Public sector employment relations are increasingly difficult for public sector unions. This paper uses the concept of community unionism to explore how and when relationships between unions and community organisations may enhance union power and success in bargaining and policy reform.

• Varieties Of Social Unionism: Towards A Framework For Comparison

The proliferation and interchangeable use of multiple terms in the union renewal literature – “social movement unionism, union-community coalitions, social unionism, community unionism, social justice unionism or citizenship movement unionism” – complicates our understanding of social unionism’s specificity.

• Strength in Networks: Employment Rights Organizations and the Problem of Co-Ordination

In recent decades, alternative organizations and movements — ‘quasi-unions’ — have emerged to fill gaps in the US system of representation caused by union decline. We examine the record of quasi-unions and find that although they have sometimes helped workers who lack other means of representation, they have significant limitations and are unlikely to replace unions as the primary means of representation. But networks, consisting of sets of diverse actors including unions and quasi-unions, are more promising.

Books

• Power in Coalition

The labor movement sees coalitions as a key tool for union revitalization and social change, but there is little analysis of what makes them successful or the factors that make them fail.

See Also

• Community Mapping