DanClawson.The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Cornell University Press, 2003). A progressive transformation, Clawson believes, will be difficult or impossible without the active involvement of the working class and its collective voice, the labor movement.
3.
RickFantasiaKimVoss.Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (University of California Press, 2004). Fantasia and Voss examine the decline of the American labor movement and the emergence of a new kind of “social movement unionism” that suggests the potential revival of unionism in the United States.
4.
StephenLerner. “An Immodest Proposal: A New Architecture for the House of Labor.” New Labor Forum12, no. 2 (Summer 2003):7–30; and “A Winning Strategy to Do Justice.” Tikkun (May/June 2005): 50–51. Drawing lessons from how SEIU remade itself so that workers could take on big, nonunion employers, Lerner argues that the labor movement's structure, culture, and priorities stand in the way of workers' gains and the need to change.
5.
RuthMilkman.L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). Milkman explains how Los Angeles, once known as a company town hostile to labor, became a hotbed of unionism, and how immigrant service workers emerged as the unlikely leaders in the battle for workers' rights.
6.
RuthMilkmanKimVoss, eds. Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (Cornell University Press, 2004). Milkman and Voss bring together established researchers and a new generation of labor scholars to assess the current state of labor organizing and its relationship to union revitalization.
7.
SaskiaSassen.Cities in a World Economy (Pine Forge Press, 2006). Sassen uses the term “global cities” to capture the growth of service firms under globalization and their concentration in a small number of cities, as well as discussing these firms' increasing dependence on low-paid service workers.
