Union Mergers; Some Questions Raised by a “Disorderly Breakup”

This essay discusses the 2004 merger between UNITE, a clothing workers’ union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union. Many labor scholars and union proponents believed that this merger would revive a dormant US labor movement and lead to great success in union organizing. Although much was expected, there was very little accomplished by this merger. While union mergers can either be amalgamations or absorptions, the UNITE-HERE merger took the former form. Although successful amalgamations usually occur when the two unions share a common jurisdiction, additional problems occur when the unions are dissimilar in size and type of members. The UNITE-HERE merger displayed none of these three above-mentioned characteristics. This essay also discusses issues of the centralization/decentralization of union mergers, the negotiation and promotion of such combinations, local union and national union mergers while concluding with a discussion of whether union mergers are an appropriate strategy for dealing with a struggling US labor movement early in the twenty-first century.     

Introduction to “The Dual-Agency Problem of Labor Union Pension Fund Shareholder Activism”

Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal -     

Introduction to “Breaking New Ground: Social Movement Theory and the Cincinnati Union Co-ops”

Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal -     

Disequilibrium models due to a “learning by doing” process

Sommario Si considerino fluttuazioni e crescita in un modello neo-keynesiano in tre diverse ipotesi macroeconomiche, che danno origine a diversi modelli matematici in tempo discreto, o mappe. In particolare si analizza un modello di crescita bidimensionale, rappresentato da un endomorfismo lineare a tratti. Separando il comportamento dinamico delle pendenze di rette che escono dall'origine, dalla dinamica dei punti su tali rette, si mostra che il comportamento dinamico del modello è governato dalla dinamica di un endomorfismo unidimensionale. Ciò semplifica lo studio dei valori di biforcazione che creano rette invarianti, su cui le traiettorie sono divergenti, e consente di determinare il bacino di attrazione di regioni assorbenti che contengono i cammini di crescita, regolari o caotici.

---

Fluctuations and growth in a new-keynesian model are considered in three different macroeconomic assumptions, giving rise to different mathematical models in discrete time, or maps. In particular a two-dimensional growth model represented by a piecewise linear endomorphism is analysed. Separating the dynamics of the slopes of straight lines issuing from the origin, from those of the points on these lines, it is shown that the dynamics of the model are governed by the dynamics of a one-dimensional endomorphism. This simplifies the study of the bifurcation values which create invariant lines on which the trajectories are divergent, and enable us to determine the basin of attraction of the absorbing region which includes regular or chaotic growth paths.

---

---

This paper relates to the activities of the M.U.R.S.T. Group Dinamiche Nonlineari ed Applicazioni alle Scienze Economiche e Sociali.