Union Responses to Alcoholism

Abstract

Union people are more often doers than writers. Consequently, the actions of labor unions in combating alcoholism have been underdocumented. Unions have developed, and have experience in, a number of occupational alcoholism formats; but the labor movement is still frequently overlooked by Occupational Program Consultants and left out of company programs by unionized employers. A joint labor-management effort is preferred by most labor alcoholism specialists, and conceptually a joint program offers many strengths, but distrust by both unions and management has kept this form of program from developing as rapidly as has the occupational alcoholism field as a whole.

This paper describes some of the different approaches to occupational alcoholism programming taken by labor organizations, and addresses some of the issues raised by these experiences.