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The Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University is proud to announce the release of “Beyond the NLRB: Contemporary Strategies and Practices for Labor Movement Renewal.”
DOWNLOAD "BEYOND THE NLRB" HERE
This report on the non-traditional paths of organizing in the contemporary American labor movement is animated by a central question: What will it take to reverse organized labor’s decline? As we interviewed sources across the United States about the landscape of twenty-first century labor, that question flowed into several secondary ones: What strategies are workers’ organizations trying out? Do those strategies redistribute wealth? Do they build workers’ power? What conditions will it take for the strategies to work? Can they scale up, or translate to different contexts? And lastly, are they sustainable?
“Beyond the NLRB” asks these questions of different worker empowerment strategies that do not aim simply to organize more workers through the National Labor Relations Board recognition process. Given the severe constraints of existing labor law in contrast to the clear enthusiasm for labor unions and organizing today, it behooves unionists and other organizational leaders to be searching for and assessing new means of empowering workers. Many of the strategies and innovations discussed in what follows have prominent advocates and organizations holding them up as the key, or at least a key, to worker empowerment in the twenty-first century. While we are often in disagreement with such assessments, the strategies and innovations examined in this section all have certain successes to their name, and some could, under the right circumstances, scale in various ways, or at least be replicated in other contexts, bearing further potential to build the power of working people and redistribute social wealth. This report is thus not simply a survey of all existing practices of worker empowerment, but rather an analysis of strategies and innovations that bear potential for labor movement revitalization.