Point of consumption: Work, consciousness and organizing in the retail sector
Item
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Title
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Point of consumption: Work, consciousness and organizing in the retail sector
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:7e05e6926f09:11793
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identifier
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12457
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Creator
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Ikeler, Peter Richard,
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Contributor
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Ruth Milkman
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Labor relations | class consciousness | New York | organizing | retail | service work
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Abstract
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The decline of the American labor movement is a well-known phenomenon. Of its most salient causes, globalization, employer resistance and union bureaucratization have been thoroughly investigated. But the ascendance of service work---a fourth oft-cited cause---has not. Specifically, the internal dynamics of private-sector services have not been sufficiently examined as a possible explanation for union decline. This study derives a series of hypotheses from the sociology of service work, labor process and union revitalization literatures, and then explores them through three qualitative case studies of work and organizing in America's largest low-wage service industry: retail trade. Two cases---Macy's and Target stores in New York City---are compared to assess the structure and trajectory of contemporary dynamics in the low-wage service workplace, and a third---the Retail Action Project (RAP), an innovative workers' center in the same city---is used to assess three strategies for service worker organizing. Data consist of more than 80 in-depth interviews with frontline workers, managers, RAP members and officials as well as documentary analysis and participant observation. At Macy's, I find that an adversarial model of work organization engenders opposition and union receptivity among workers, while Target's team-based consensus model---based on a deskilled labor process and explicit anti-union initiatives---mitigates the emergence of similar attitudes among its workforce. Age and job tenure, however, are decisive factors at both stores, with Target employing a higher proportion of younger and Caribbean workers than Macy's. Analysis of the Retail Action Project displays the limitations of organizing large retail firms on a local basis, but also the promise of open-membership models for the future of service worker unionism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
