Trade unions and the unemployed: Organizing strategies, conflict, and control

While trade unions have an interest in mobilizing the unemployed politically, they almost never do. Trade unions need to minimize unemployment to expand their power against management and government. Mobilizing the jobless for the expansion of unemployment insurance is a method of lessening the threat of lower wages, reduced union density, and weaker bargaining positions for unions. The mobilization and the formation of alliances with the unemployed would also reduce divisions within the trade union movement between skilled and unskilled workers. Despite these advantages, trade unions have rarely organized the unemployed, because they represent a potential threat to organizational control, leadership, and legitimacy. Moreover, the interests of the unemployed conflict with those of the securely employed trade unionists. This dissertation examines the problematic relationship between unions and the unemployed in New York City during the early 1990s.; Three arenas of union responses to unemployment are identified: (1) autonomous trade union action; (2) joint trade union action through established labor bodies; (3) responses to unemployment through ad hoc coalitions of trade unions and outside activist organizations. The case studies modify understanding of the role of the relationships between trade unions and the unemployed by recognizing the influence of organizing strategies. My research suggests that hiring hall unions produce exclusive organizing strategies that have deeper accountability to their members but organizing objectives that are limited to serving the narrow interests of core members, and workplace-based unions typically engender class-oriented unions with narrow accountability to members but deeper organizing objectives that extend beyond immediate members.