This introductory article offers an overview of the contemporary labor movement revitalization perspective. Moving beyond the transformation of industrial relations literature of the 1980s and 1990s, this growing body of work has emerged in response to contemporary realities, to address above all the urgency of innovative union strategies in the face of dramatically worsening international and domestic conditions. There are two central arguments in the revitalization literature. The first is that contemporary circumstances provide openings for a resurgence of social movement unionism. The second is that such strategies matter: They have been instrumental in promoting workplace, social, and political change, and they contain as well the potential for breakthroughs in labor movement and broader democratic revitalization.
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