Doctoral Dissertation Research: Collective Bargaining and Decision-making Processes

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SES-1303680David MeyerAmanda PullumUniversity of California-IrvineWhile private sector unions have been experiencing a precipitous decline in membership for the past 50 years, public K-12 teachers have the highest union membership rates of any American workers. With this prominence has come opposition. In 2011 alone, twenty state legislatures held floor votes on bills restricting collective bargaining and tenure protections for public schoolteachers. Faced with these similar actions, teachers unions mounted a variety of responses, including rallies of all sizes, lobbying, and judicial and legislative challenges. The researcher will study why unions responded differently to similar legislative action. Examining the strategic choices made by unions will shed new light on how both labor and non-labor activists work to bring about social and legislative change.This study brings important insights to an important debate in the literature on social movements: what factors do activists consider when deciding upon strategy? Previous scholarship has offered many possible answers, such as the nature of the threat, existing laws, organizational structure, and ideology. This research examines strategic choices of teachers unions and the process through which particular strategies were chosen in four states-- Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, and Idaho. Two of the states, Tennessee and Idaho are right-to-work states; and two, Wisconsin and Ohio, are not right-to-work states. The planned analysis will identify the causal conditions most important to teachers unions? strategic decision-making processes; explain the mechanisms by which these conditions influenced strategic choice and resulted in widely varying responses to similar legislation; and compare how union members in the four states considered these causal factors when choosing strategies. Broader ImpactsResults of this study will be disseminated to both academic and public audiences. The findings will be presented at a wide variety of conferences, and ultimately, the dissertation will be transformed into a book, which will be easily accessible to members of the public with an interest in labor unions. The findings of this study will be of use to scholars of social movement strategy, labor unions, and similar organizations such as public interest groups. In addition, this study will contribute to public knowledge and discourse on social movements and organized labor in education and the modern American workforce.