Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream By Janice Fine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 316p. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. The notion that immigrants need institutions of support as they try to make it in the U.S. economy is certainly nothing new. At the turn of the century, Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, beginning in Chicago with Hull House, made it their mission to provide the types of support that would ease immigrants' transition into American life. Janice Fine's Worker Centers is essentially a primer for activists on the role of worker centers as institutions designed to provide support to low-wage workers, especially immigrant workers in metropolitan areas. Defining worker centers as community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers, Fine considers the effectiveness of these centers in improving the lives of low-wage workers. She also raises an even larger question: Just what institutional mechanisms are necessary for integrating low-wage immigrants into American civil society so that they can derive the benefits of ongoing economic representation and political action?

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream

http://csx.sagepub.com/content/40/1/20.full.pdf

Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States

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With or Without Class: A Comparative Study of Union-Worker Cooperative Relations in the U.S. and South Korea

The global restructuring of the capitalist political economy of work has catalysed an existential crisis of trade unionism. The search for ways in which to renew and revitalise organised labour is the most urgent task of the global trade union movement.
 
In doing so however, this thesis asks firstly, when developing strategies for trade union renewal what role does learning and knowledge production play? Secondly it asks, how is that learning and knowledge gained through social action made material? The former question lays at the heart of this thesis investigation. The latter is a significant reflection of its findings.
 
This thesis explores the experience of an international body of trade unionists who completed the MA in international labour and trade union studies (ILTUS) at Ruskin College, Oxford between 2006 and 2016. The MA aimed to address the need for the renewal of organised labour, and exemplified Ruskin’s historical role in assisting trade unions internationally in addressing the ‘conditions for change’.
 
The thesis builds upon and expands in significant, original ways existing scholarship in the field of trade union education. It rests upon traditions of informal learning and knowledge production across social movement literature, which in turn is embedded in radical adult pedagogy including that of Freire and Gramsci.

Methodologically, the thesis applied a critical educational research approach to explore the impact of the MA learning experience. In doing so it involved students in a modified form of the co-production of research design. The research sought to explore degrees of transformation and agential outcomes as a result of MA radical pedagogic and curricula processes. This was supplemented by learner’s own critical reflexive analysis of impact on their movement practice. As such, the thesis applied the theoretical framework of renewal actor to analyse findings.

The findings of the thesis are based on empirical research comprising interviews with a purposive sample of current students and alumni. This methodological approach was allied to an online survey which was completed by the majority of those who enrolled on the MA.

The thesis finds that learners account for their experience of the MA in ways which reflect their embodied sense of trade union activism: that identity, consciousness and knowledge accrue as a result of informal learning undertaken through trade union struggle. Thus, a wholly original grounded theory of embodied activism forms the basis upon which findings attune to the renewal actor proposition. Findings however, move far beyond this proposition in epistemological and ontological terms to generate original grounded theories of knowing and being.

The thesis asserts that knowledge production processes and outcomes of MA learners mirror that of actors within allied social movements. As such findings argue for an education for renewal that draws on MA pedagogy to refresh trade union educational methodologies. This lays the basis for a more coherent set of relations with a wider of body of movements as part of an allied agenda for radical social change in the 21st century, and as means to achieve trade union renewal.

Learning, knowledge and trade union renewal : an analysis of the student experience of the MA in international labour and trade union studies Ruskin College, Oxford (2006-2016)

This volume focuses on the new and diversifying interactions between civil society and the state in contemporary East Asia by including cases of entanglement and contention in the three fully consolidated democracies in the area: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The book argues that all three countries have reached a new era of post high-growth and mature democracy, leading to new social anxieties and increasing normative diversity, which have direct repercussions on the relationship between the state and civil society. It introduces a comparative perspective in identifying and discussing similarities and differences in East Asia based on in-depth case studies in the fields of environmental issues, national identities as well as neoliberalism and social inclusion that go beyond the classic dichotomy of state vs "liberal" civil society.

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Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia : Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth

This article examines organizational characteristics of Japanese community unions and analyses similarities and differences in the organizational forms and activities of community unionism between Japan and other industrialized countries. The article first outlines the conceptual framework of community unionism based on the literature review of studies on cases in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, and then examines to what extent the framework is applicable to the Japanese case. Although there are some common features, one of the important differences of community unionism between Japan and other industrialized countries is the weakness of coalition-building between community unions and community-based organizations in Japan compared to other countries. The article argues that the forms of community unionism are mediated by civil societal and institutional contexts of labour movements, and that the relative underdevelopment of civil society and industrial relations institutions (liberal union recognit...

Community Unions in Japan: Similarities and Differences of Region-based Labour Movements between Japan and Other Industrialized Countries

This article analyses how diverse stances toward nuclear energy were produced and reproduced among Japanese labour unions from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and how these stances of the formative period influenced the subsequent development of inter-union politics before and after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011, based on content analysis of union bulletins and other materials of pro- and anti-nuclear energy unions. This article asks three research questions: (i) what factors contributed to pro- or anti-nuclear energy stances of labour unions?; (ii) what elements constituted or framed unions’ arguments on the issue of nuclear energy?; and (iii) what impact did these stances and arguments formed in the early period have on the subsequent development of inter-union politics over nuclear energy, especially in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster? The paper shows union ideologies and institutional integration were the factors influencing unions’ stances on nuclear energy. It ...

Japanese Labour Unions and Nuclear Energy: A Historical Analysis of Their Ideologies and Worldviews

This article examines the historical development of the relationships between labor unions and civil society organizations (CSOs) in postwar Japan from the 1950s to the 2000s. The paper focuses on union-CSO relationships in three periods: the “post-authoritarian” period (the 1950s), the period of controversies over industrial pollution (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s), and the period of union decline and neoliberalism (the 1990s and the 2000s). In the first period, the labor movement led coalitions as a “vanguard.” In the second period, the relationship between labor unions and CSOs became distant or tense. In the third period, to regain their social presence, labor unions formed coalitions with non-profit organizations (NPOs), and relationships between unions and CSOs were relatively equal. The third period also saw the development of more militant union-CSO coalitions to oppose labor market deregulation.

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The Changing Relationship between Labor Unions and Civil Society Organizations in Postwar Japan

Co-operative economic unionism, the type of unionism commonly associated with the Japanese model of industrial relations, was politically constructed through conflicts between advocates of economic unionism and Communists, as well as between advocates of different types of economic unionism.This paper examines three factors shaping union behavior: (I) the vision or worldview of union leaders; (2) a union's own political dynamics; and (3) the labor policies of management. Using the experience of the Yahata Steel Union in the 1960s as a case study, I argue that these three factors help explain the change in the union's policy orientation from militant economic unionism in the first half of the 1960s, to co-operative economic unionism in the second half of the 1960s.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/30209279.pdf

Akira Suzuki

Papers

Community Unions in Japan: Similarities and Differences of Region-based Labour Movements between Japan and Other Industrialized Countries

Japanese Labour Unions and Nuclear Energy: A Historical Analysis of Their Ideologies and Worldviews

The Changing Relationship between Labor Unions and Civil Society Organizations in Postwar Japan

The transformation of the vision of labor unionism: internal union politics in the Japanese steel industry in the 1960s

Cross-National Comparisons of Social Movement Unionism