Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction by Lynn R. Williams
- 1 A Future for the American Labor Movement?
- 2 Industrial Relations in a Time of Change
- 3 A Survey of American Union Strategies
- 4 The Old Reformist Unionism: The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor
- 5 The New Reformist Unionism: CAFE
- 6 A New Version of an Old Reformist Strategy: Employee Ownership
- 7 Social Democratic Unionism in Action: Strategies of European Trade Unions
- 8 A New Twist and TURN on Social Democratic Unionism: Unions and Regional Economic Development
- 9 A Labor Movement for the Twenty-First Century
- Appendix: Interview with John J. Sweeney, President, AFL-CIO
- References
- Index
7 - Social Democratic Unionism in Action: Strategies of European Trade Unions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction by Lynn R. Williams
- 1 A Future for the American Labor Movement?
- 2 Industrial Relations in a Time of Change
- 3 A Survey of American Union Strategies
- 4 The Old Reformist Unionism: The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor
- 5 The New Reformist Unionism: CAFE
- 6 A New Version of an Old Reformist Strategy: Employee Ownership
- 7 Social Democratic Unionism in Action: Strategies of European Trade Unions
- 8 A New Twist and TURN on Social Democratic Unionism: Unions and Regional Economic Development
- 9 A Labor Movement for the Twenty-First Century
- Appendix: Interview with John J. Sweeney, President, AFL-CIO
- References
- Index
Summary
We must make a politics of quality. We cannot look only at the losers in change, but also at the winners.
Wilhelm Adamy, International Affairs, DGB (German Labor Federation), 1994In attempting to identify a range of possible strategies that might be useful to the American labor movement, it is helpful to view strategic approaches utilized by trade unions in countries where the national cultures bear at least a general resemblance to that of the United States. Also, Western European labor movements have recently been quite innovative. Europe provides an interesting set of national laboratories for the testing of strategies by a different type of unionism – Social Democratic Unionism – in a somewhat different setting. In addition, there is an important experiment in cross-national industrial relations currently going on in the European Community (EC).
Social Democratic Unionism, similar to Reformist Unionism, is a path not often taken by American trade unions. In the next two chapters, we will look at Social Democratic Unionism. First, in this chapter, we will examine a wide range of strategies and tactics employed in recent years by the traditionally Social Democratic labor movements of Western Europe. Second, in the next chapter, we will look at a particular Social Democratic strategy – contributing to regional economic development – that has been adopted in both Europe and North America.
As was done in Chapter 3 with strategies of American unions, national-level strategies of Western European trade unions are categorized according to the typology laid out in Chapter 1.
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- The Future of the American Labor Movement , pp. 145 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002