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Occupy Wall Street protest with union members |
Executives of large firms have been known to worry about social
movement activity of three kinds. There are movements that encourage various
kinds of costly state actions, such as cleaning up pollution or reducing carbon
emission, which at some level will lead to taxation to cover the cost. There
are movements that engage in boycotts and other actions to discourage firms
from various cost-saving misbehaviors such as farming out production to nations
with very loose labor and environmental protections. And inside the firm, labor
movement advocates take action through established unions or through trying to form
new unions where none yet exist. Responding to all this activity can exhaust
executives, and they might not like to hear that these movements are related to
each other.
How they are related is the topic of an article in Administrative Science Quarterly by John-Paul Ferguson, Thomas Dudley, and Sarah Soule. They look at how social movements outside the firm but in the same
city influence unionization drives inside the firm. This is interesting because
social movements and unions operate very differently, with unions under much
stricter rules and restrictions, so the influence is not a result of workers
learning anything useful about unions by taking part in social movements. In
fact, it is not even clear that they do take part in social movements, because
the mechanism behind this effect requires only that workers can see social
movements, not that they participate.
Protests
outside create unions inside, except when there are laws outside that make
unions less necessary. What does that mean for our situation now? The laws
outside are being weakened, and protests are getting stronger. Could it be a
time for more unions?
Unions are built on procedures and ideas, with workers’ rights and
equal opportunity among the most important ideas. It would make sense that the
presence of similar progressive ideas in social movements in the same community
could inspire union activity in firms, whereas social movements with more
conservative ideology might have less effect on unionization because they have
much less overlap with the ideology driving unionization.
This is exactly what the authors found to be true in U.S. cities.
Protests in a city led to unionization drives in the same city, and this effect
was stronger when the protests were related to progressive causes, including
civil rights and gender equality. So protests outside a firm filter into
unionization inside, specifically when the outside protests concern issues that
workers inside also care about. But
there are additional details that make things even more interesting. Unions are
not the only way for workers to solve problems. The Civil Rights movement and
the women’s movement also had successes with changing the law, which meant that
workers could contest gender or racial discrimination through the legal system
rather than through unionizing. As a result, these movements’ effects on
unionization were significantly reduced after the legal changes. So ideology
matters, but competition from the law does as well.