Immigrant Unionization through the Great Recession

Abstract

After decades of de-unionization, research suggests that Hispanics-and Hispanic immigrants in particular-may revitalize organized labor in the United States. Most of this research consists of case studies of individual organizing campaigns (see, e.g., Milkman 2006). In 2009, however, Rosenfeld and Kleykamp (hereafter RK) set out to determine whether these campaigns had produced quantifiable gains at the national level. By analyzing detailed data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), they found that when compared to native-born whites "many Hispanic subgroups are no less likely," and some Hispanic subgroups are "more likely," to join or belong to labor unions (Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009:933). These results are important, for they buttress the hopes of both Hispanic workers, who view union membership as a potential avenue to upward mobility, and union organizers, who view immigrants as a potential source of new members. RK note that overall union density is low in the United States, and that unionization is therefore unlikely to usher in widespread assimilation absent a "fundamental restructuring of the institutional underpinnings of organized 473107A SRXXX10.

Organized Labor and the Unionization of Hispanic, Chinese, and Filipino Americans

“…Additionally I utilize year dummies to control for year-to-year factors like business cycle effects that may influence unionization. As Catron (2013) found, the negative effects of the recession, particularly unemployment, are likely to affect unionization. To account for this event, I include a term for the co-ethnic unemployment rate for March the year of the survey and interact that effect with the other independent variables.…”

“…In addition to firm size, labor market position models offer controls for major industrial, occupational, and geographic characteristics that may affect unionization. Rather than including dummy variables for broad industrial and occupational categories as others have done (Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009; Catron 2013), I use continuous variables that measure the percentage unionized within detailed three-digit occupation and industry categories. This provides a much more finely tuned measure of the effect of industry or occupation on the unionization of individuals.…”

“… 5. To test for recessionary effects, I also ran models similar to Catron’s (2013), which divided the data into pre-, intermediate, and recession time periods. However there were not significant differences in union joining across the time periods for the populations of interest.…”

The Geography of Occupational Concentration Among Low-Skilled Immigrants

“…The second variable is union membership, which has been shown to have a substantial effect on individual wages (Budd & Na, 2000) and more broadly to decrease income inequality (Card, 2001; Western & Rosenfeld, 2011). Immigrants have been shown to join unions at a higher propensity than the native-born (Catron, 2013; Rosenfeld & Kleykamp, 2009), which should act to further concentrate workers in those protected industries. Using data gathered from an online database developed by Hirsch and Macpherson (2003), we predict that the rate of union membership in a region will increase occupational concentration among low-skilled immigrants.…”

Low-status work repercussions on Egyptians’ collective organisation

“…Moreover, all sociological research stresses the lack of community's basic characteristics (Papastergiadis, 2000;Castles, 2002;Vermeulen, 2004). There are difficulties interpreting what these collectivities are, how they are formed and developed and what their unification element is: nationality, gender, class, religion, location, culture, occupation or some other factor (Castles, 2011;Gleeson and Bloemraad, 2012;Bloemraad, 2013;Bloemraad and Schönwälder, 2013;Catron, 2013). Immigrants are exposed to flexible and non-registered low-prestige labour that is characterised by decollectivisation, in other words alienation from collective and communal networks (Sennett, 1998).…”