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This article examines the relationship between income inequality and collective labor rights, conceptualized as workers' legal and practical ability to engage in collective activity. Although worker organization is central to explaining income inequality in industrialized democracies, worldwide comparative studies have neglected the role of class-based actors. I argue that the repression of labor rights reduces the capacity of worker organizations to effectively challenge income inequality through market and political processes in capitalist societies. Labor rights, however, are unlikely to have uniform effects across regions. This study uses unbalanced panel data for 100 developed and less developed countries from 1985 through 2002. Randomand fixed-effects models find that strong labor rights are tightly linked to lower inequality across a large range of countries, including in the Global South. Interactions between regions and labor rights suggest that the broader context in which class-based actors are embedded shapes worker organizations' ability to reduce inequality. During the period of this study, labor rights were particularly important for mitigating inequality in the West but less so in Eastern Europe.

The authors examine intersectional earnings inequalities in U.S. state and local government workplaces during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2011. Corresponding to closure and exploitation mechanisms as proposed in Relational Inequality Theory, the authors decompose pay gaps into between-workplace and within-workplace segregation components and within-job disparities. Between-workplace closure mechanisms tend to be absent or weak for all comparisons, but within-workplace occupational closure and within-job pay disparities are present for all and quite large for most groups. Within-job earnings inequalities tend to be largest for Black, Hispanic, and Native American women and smallest for Asian and Native American men. During the Great Recession, organizational resources to make claims on shrank, as low-wage job layoffs surged and resources contracted. This resulted in a shrinking of within-workplace and within-job, but rising between-workplace, inequalities.

This research uses comparative survey data to examine the effects of labor union membership on individual political participation. We argue that national political institutions—specifically, democracy and corporatism—shape the ways that unions mobilize their members to engage in the political sphere. Democratic regimes provide structural opportunities and cultural repertoires that lead unions to focus on member mobilization, especially via contentious politics and political parties. Corporatism, which directly links unions to state structures, undercuts the logics and incentives for union mobilization. We draw upon historical cases of Germany, the United States, Chile, and Egypt to illustrate how democracy and corporatism shape unions’ mobilization efforts. Multilevel models of World Values Survey data from roughly 60 countries find that union members participate more than non-members across a range of electoral and extra-institutional political acts, such as demonstrating, occupying buildings, signing petitions, party work, and so forth. In democratic societies, such effects are stronger and participation shifts toward parties and contentious politics. In less democratic societies, union members are particularly likely to work with and through other political organizations. Corporatist arrangements generally dampen the political activities of union members.

Labor in the Time of Trump critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the Left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The contributors show that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. Essays in the volume examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes. Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest; Bill Fletcher, Jr., author ofSolidarity Divided; Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Sarah Jaffe, co-host ofDissent Magazine's Belabored podcast; Cedric Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago; Jennifer Klein, Yale University; Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center; Jose La Luz, labor activist and public intellectual; Nancy MacLean, Duke University; MaryBe McMillan, President of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO; Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Lara Skinner, The Worker Institute at Cornell University; Kyla Walters, Sonoma State University

Hundreds of thousands of workers die on the job each year around the world, with disproportionately high fatality rates in the global South. Using fixed effects regression models for 51 countries located in the global South, this research examines how shifts in state context, ties to international organizations, and economic context affect worker fatalities from 1985 and 2002. We find that strengthening collective labor rights—the ability to protest and form worker organizations free from repression—is tightly linked to fewer fatalities. Certain forms of global institutional ties are related to workers' deaths. Increased links to international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are associated with fewer deaths. Ratification of International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, however, is decoupled from fatalities. We examine ratification of a specific safety convention, as well as general embeddedness in the ILO, as represented by ratification of the fundamental conventions. Finally, measures of economic globalization, Foreign Direct Investment and exports, have no significant relationship to fatalities, net of socio-political factors. To unpack the mechanisms underlying the qunatitative results, we present three illustrations: construction workers in Uruguay, garment workers in Bangladesh, and miners in South Africa.

This article examines the effect of union membership on civic and political participation in the late 20 th century in the United States. We discuss why and how unions seek to mobilize their members and where mobilization is channeled. We argue that union membership affects electoral and collective action outcomes and will be larger for low socioeconomic status individuals. Statistical analyses find that union membership is associated with many forms of political activity, including voting, protesting, association membership, and others. Union effects are larger for less educated individuals, a group that otherwise exhibits low levels of participation. Union membership is not associated with outcomes distant from union political agendas, such as general volunteering and charitable giving, suggesting that unions generate political capital rather than generalized social capital.

Women are underrepresented in U.S. tenure-track faculty positions, and institutional interventions are key to creating greater gender equality and accessing women's potential. This study examines the effectiveness of one \"transformational\" intervention, the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation initiative, implemented at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in 2001. We compare data on women's representation in faculty positions before and during the UCI ADVANCE Program (1993–2009) to that of seven other campuses in the University of California system, where no initiatives of this scale were implemented. Using descriptive figures, T tests, and regression analyses, we find that UCI had a higher percentage of women faculty and hired a greater percentage of women during ADVANCE years, but did not retain women at a greater rate. We describe the UCI ADVANCE program and its structure, including its \"Equity Advisors,\" who we suggest have been important in improving women's representation among faculty at UCI.

Public sector employees are highly engaged in civic and political life, from voting to volunteering. Scholars have theorized that this political activity stems from “public service motivation,” or the selection of publicly oriented individuals into public work. We build on this work by analyzing the role of public sector unions in shaping participation. Unions are central mobilizing organizations in political life, and one in three public sector workers are unionized. Special supplements of the Current Population Survey provide data on various forms of participation, sector, union membership, and union coverage. Logistic regressions find that unionized public sector workers have much higher odds of engaging in a range of activities compared to non-union public workers, including protest, electoral politics, and political communication. Union membership impacts service work to a lesser extent, suggesting that unions are more central to political lives. These findings have implications for the consequences of union decline, including the class, race, and gender composition of who participates in democratic life.