The Significance of the Living Wage for US Workers in the Early Twenty-First Century

This article provides an introduction to the importance of the living wage for low-wage workers in the United States. Described as a wage based on an estimation of the official poverty threshold for a family of four, the living wage, as an alternative to the minimum wage, is based on the notion that people working at full-time jobs, and their families, should not have to live in poverty. After discussing the emergence and growth of living wage campaigns in the United States, this essay discusses the coverage and provisions of living wage statutes, the economic effects of living wage ordinances as well as additional benefits provided to workers and unions from living wage statute implementation. The article concludes that due to the current economic conditions in the United States, the struggle to attain a living wage will become increasingly relevant in the coming years.     

Manufacturing Resistance: Rationalizing the Irrationality of Managerial Control on the Shop Floor in a US Medical Electronics Factory

Juravich (1985) asserts that the organization of US industrial manufacturing is irrational as well as appearing chaotic from the workers’ viewpoint because of management’s refusal to integrate the workers’ knowledge into the production process. Because of this, Juravich argues, if and when the workers’ knowledge is integrated into the production system, the workers no longer will experience “chaos on the shop floor.” Extending Devinatz’s (1993) analysis in response to Juravich, this article argues that workers use resistance as a logical strategy for rationalizing what they perceive to be the irrationality of the shop floor. Utilizing Kusterer’s (1978) work, I argue that the use of many, but not all, resistance strategies constitutes a type of “survival knowledge” acquired and used by workers in response to managerial control. I maintain that these strategies constitute a special type of workplace resistance which I refer to as “pure and simple resistance.”     

A Response to the British Journal of Industrial Relations Symposium on the Human Rights Watch Report: A Minimum Program for Promoting Collective Bargaining Rights as a Human Right

The publication of Unfair Advantage, a report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW), documents and analyzes how employers routinely violate international human rights standards by depriving U.S. workers of their legal right to organize. In a recent symposium on Unfair Advantage published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, 7 essays analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the HRW report from a variety of ideological and theoretical perspectives. Although the scholars who wrote these essays raised a number of important issues concerning Unfair Advantage, they failed to provide any concrete or practical methodologies for using this report to promote the collective bargaining rights of U.S. workers in the early years of the twenty-first century. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to critique these symposium papers as well as to propose a minimum program, on the basis of Unfair Advantage, for advancing the collective bargaining rights of U.S. workers.