Restoring the Power of Unions
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It Takes a Movement
Julius G. Getman
The labor movement is weak and divided. Some think that it is dying. But Julius Getman, a preeminent labor scholar, demonstrates through examination of recent developments that a resurgent labor movement is possible. He proposes new models for organizing and innovating techniques to strengthen the strike weapon. Above all, he insists that unions must return to their historical roots as a social movement.
“Jack Getman's comprehensive study of the hotel workers union gave me new appreciation of an organization that has indeed tried to change to win. Restoring union power takes more than just rhetoric and top-down restructuring. It requires long-term workplace and community-based struggles, for bargaining rights and better contracts, of the sort brilliantly described in Getman's book.”—Steve Early, former CWA organizer and author of Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home
“Getman speaks with experience and authority…his book is a major contribution to the literature.”—Choice
"American unions, like every 21st-century human institution, must re-invent themselves, or (as labor history demonstrates) American workers will invent something else. Jack Getman’s Restoring the Power of Unions points the way toward a labor movement that understands its role at the center of the social movement Americans so desperately need."—John W. Wilhelm, President, UNITE HERE
Publication Date: November 27, 2012