A voluntary association of employees with the major aim of COLLECTIVE BARGAINING for improvements in wages and other conditions. These are either LOCAL UNIONS (restricting membership to a local area) or INTERNATIONAL UNIONS (covering the whole of the...

The American Labor Movement The rise of the huge and powerful railroads and other giant industries during and after the American Civil War (1861–65) signaled a loss of voice for workers. In the small, employer-owned businesses of earlier times,...

Labor movements are collective activities by wage and salaried workers in market societies to improve their economic, social, and political status. The main manifestations of such movements are labor unions and political parties, but sometimes they...

Modern day labor unions in the United States function as legally recognized representatives of workers in numerous industries, but are strongest among public sector employees such as teachers and police. Activity by labor unions in the United States...

This paper considers how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is likely to affect labor movement power in Canada and the United States. The paper is divided into four parts. It first defines the concept of "labor movement power," breaking it down into...

After decades of meticulous case studies, labor history is returning to the big questions. Recent works by William Forbath, Gary Marks, and Gwendolyn Mink, for example, have come back to that old question central to the old labor history: "Why no socialism in...