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O pen Source U nion ismB eyond E xclusive C ollective B arg ainingRichard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers

To increase density in the private sector. unionsshould explore a form of unionization that is open tononmajority memberships. This form-which theauthors call "open source" unionism-would mekeextensive use of the Internet to deliver individualservices to workers. This article describes currentunion activity heading in this general direction. Itassesses the legal and edministretivc feasibility ofopen source unionism and suggests ways unionscould develop it further.

PRIVATE-S.ECTOR UNIONIZATION, once the mainstay of the us.labor movement, is heading toward extinction as an im-portant institution ofAmerican working life.With unionmembership concentrated in shrinking industrial sectors, andunion density now down to 9percent-below the level of a cen-tury ago1-private-sector unions have effectively become"ghettoized." Collectivebargaining agreements no longer guidethe terms and conditions ofwork in broader labormarkets. And

RICHARD B. FREEMAN, p ro fe ss or o f e co no mic s a t H ar va rd U ni ve rs ity , is codi re c to r o f t he Ha r va rdTrade U nion P rogram , director of Labor Studies at the N ational B ureau of E conom ic R esearch, andc od irec to r of th e C en tre fo r E co nom ic P erform an ce , L on do n S ch ool o f E co nom ics. JO EL ROGER S,p ro fe ss or o flm u, p olitic al s cie nc e, a nd s oc io lo gy a t th e U niu er siiu o f W is co ns in -M a dis on , i s d ir ec to rof its Center 01 1 Wiscon si n S tr a te g tj .

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union representational services are not available to tens of mil-lions of workers who say they want them.Unions look healthier in the public sector, where their density

is four times higher. But public-sector union growth is stalledand has natural bounds on its importance. Public employmentis only 15 percent of national employment, and public-sectorunions cannot indefinitely maintain wage and other work normsat odds with the private economy. To have an important impacton working people, unions must turn private-sector member-ship around.Six years into John Sweeney's "new voices" leadership at the

AFL-CIO, there is little evidence of that needed turnaround. In1999, data suggested that the decline in private-sector densityhad finally been halted by new organizing efforts, albeit at a lowlevel of 9.4 percent. Since then, however, private density has re-sumed its downward path. As we write-in the midst of a na-tional recession, and on the heels of an election year in whichthe federation poured most of its discretionary resources intopolitical campaign work rather than organizing-the 1999 sta-bilization seems to have been a temporary blip. Under almostany plausible assumption, the fall in private-sector density willcontinue, with "ghetto unionism" perhaps finally settling at someequilibrium of 4-5 percent.'The sheer number of new members needed to break out of

this ghetto, and the amount of money needed to recruit them byconventional means, is daunting. Merely to maintain theirpresent share of the workforce, unions need to add about 500,000new members each year. To add a point of density, they need toorganize close to 1 million. To get back to the level where theywere when Ronald Reagan first took office, they would need todo that twelve years running. But no one has organized on thisscale since the 1930s, when plant size and industry concentra-tion, among other conditions, were radically more favorable to

-d

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big growth than they are now. And present organizing falls farshort of such a target. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)election statistics show that unions win less than 100,000work-ers annually, of whom perhaps two-thirds eventually end upwith collective bargaining contracts. The AFL-CIO's Work inProgress reports higher numbers, but onlybyincluding newAFL-CIOaffiliations ofpreviously organized workers. Of the 463,000"new members" reported in 2001, for example, about 310,000came from such affiliations.' The actual number of new union-ists for the year was a bit over 150,000,and the number of newmembers in the private sector close to the NLRBnumbers.On money, the amount needed is within labor's means, but

practically beyond its grasp. Aworkable rule of thumb puts thecost of a new member at close to $1,000in organizing expense.Soadding 1million new members annually would mean spend-ing $1 billion, or about 20 percent of total annual union dues.'With the exception of a handful of internationals, in any case,most unions are not prepared to pay this freight. Most are com-ing nowhere close to Sweeney's declared goal of dedicating 30percent of allunion revenues to organizing; some, like the Team-sters, are actually cutting their organizing budgets; and evenwhere, aswith the Steelworkers, unions have made the corrunit-ment to increase organizing and have amassed huge budgetsfor it, they seem to have trouble finding campaigns where largeexpenditures will payoff. Nor have the most publicized andfederation-supported organizing efforts in the past few years-from strawberries to apples to California airport extensions-posted much membership success. The biggest organizingbreakthroughs, as in the important Service Employees Interna-tional Union (SEIU)victory in LosAngeles for home health-careworkers, have again come in the public sector,and then throughthe use of local political clout that translates less easily to pri-vate industry.

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Sowhat should unions do? One suggestion-Sweeney's own,when asked at the recent national convention about labor's fu-ture plans-is "more of what we've done before." That meanscontinued augmentation of the national political program andcontinued calls for affiliates to "change to organize." As a dis-tinctly secondary effort, itmeans building the capacity of labor'sregional bodies, in particular the central labor councils (CLCs),and providing technical assistance and other support to unionsinterested in getting into workforce and other economic devel-opment issues, or making more concerted use of their pensionsavings."As long as management opposition remainsas determined as it is today, and nationallabor law does not change dramatically-both outcomes that seem certain-unionshave little or no chance of gaining substantialnew membership by conventional means.All this is well and good. But, in our view, it will not reverse

labor's decline. As long as management opposition remains asdetermined asit is today, and national labor law does not changedramatically-both outcomes that seem certain-unions havelittle or no chance of gaining substantial new membership byconventional means. To grow labor into a force again able tohelp a large proportion of American workers, and one feltthoughout American society,more radical change than we haveSeen thus far is almost certainly required. Eventually this willlikelymean sweeping organizational change that shifts internalincentives and power relations, alters membership, and in timeforces different political and organizing strategies. Whether ex-isting unions are up for such change, or would survive it in rec-



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ognizable form, is an open question. Todraw an analogy, we arestill in the perestroika phase of labor's internal reform, withSweeney an embattled Gorbachev.What is clear enough, however, is that the apparent inability of

existing programs to do more than slow labor's decline calls foranalysis and debate within labor-more than isnow happening-about how those programs might be amended or augmented. Weoffer this discussion as one contribution to the debate.Our central argument is that unions should explore, with seri-

ousness and at some scale, alternatives to their present tradi-tional model ofworker representation: collectivebargaining forworkers in settings where the union has demonstrated majoritysupport. That model effectively premises an employment rela-tion, once dominant in the United States, in which individualemployers were a source of near-continuous employment overa working lifetime, where earnings grew yearly, and where theemployer was a source ofhealth insurance, retirement pensions,and other nonwage aspects of worker welfare. In this context,the first and last goal of unions has been to get a "seat at thetable"with a particular employer-majority support among theirworkers and legal recognition as those workers' exclusive bar-gaining representative-from which they could build, throughcollectivebargaining, a private welfare state with that employer.However, fewer employers offer such employment conditionstoday than in the past. Work is generally less secure, less charac-terized by steady income advance, and less embodied in em-ployer obligation to provide health and retirement benefits. Thespeed at which these conditions are being lost or disturbed inthe organized sector, moreover, outpaces the speed at whichunions can organize new workers. Majorities-based collectivebargaining effectively leaves out the millions of union-friendlyworkers who find themselves in employment situations otherthan the old norm, millions who find their pro-union sentiments

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not yet shared by a majority of their colleagues, and millionswho once enjoyed collective bargaining benefits but have lostthem through employer reorganization or disappearance.Toreach such workers, unions need to develop forms ofmem-

bership and representation suitable to them through a strategyof what we callropen source unionism.:" Themembership andrepresentational activities associated with this strategy are un-derstood as supplemental to existing membership and repre-sentation, not competitive with them. Still, a union movementwidely open to this alternative would be different enough fromexisting unionism to warrant its own name.The term" open source" is drawn from the open source com-

puter programming movement. The idea there is that program-mers create and share core functionalities and modules thatothers can build upon and add to. Adherents expand the reachof the code, find things wrong with it and correct problems, andpost their visions and ideas and concerns for all to share. Theoutcome isa common, collaborative platform and language thateveryone can share. Analogously, open source unionism wouldbuild a common collaborative platform, language, and practiceamong workers and union activists-often operating at somedistance from one another, or at different work sites, or movingacross multiple sites over their working lifetimes-as part of amore unified labor movement defined by shared values morethan by present employment.As its name suggests, an open source union movement would

look for support anywhere it could find it. Itwould inconse-quence have more extended and networked dealings thanpresent unionization. Without European-style extension lawsbutwith members in more workplaces than current unions, this newunionism would seek to moderate differences across work sites.As part of its program, the promotion of such general standardswould explicitlycomplement the negotiation ofparticular collec-



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tive bargaining agreements. The search for such standards andnorms would be natural for a movement often without greatpower in particular work sites.And from that process would alsoflow its naturally greater attention to the community and otheralliances needed tomake political action successful.In contrast to the current union movement, based almost ex-clusively on workers in majority-member collective bargainingarrangements with employers, open source unionism would alsoinclude groups of workers who want union representation andadvice but who fall shy of a majority at their workplace. Suchworkers would still be full-fledged members of the labor move-ment. As against traditional members inmajority settings, how-ever, theywould bargain only for themselves, or engage in unionactivities other than collective bargaining, such as enforcementof statutory worker rights. And they would provide support foractions outside their workplace-s-preeminently; political action-that would affect conditions in it. Membership would take dif-ferent forms in different settings and with different unionaffiliations-e-sometimes dues paying at regular dues, sometimesat less, or none at all, sometimes with governance rights, some-times not. Inmost cases, such nonmajority members and forma-tions would be tied to and supported by one or anothertraditional union. But they could also take forms not contem-plated by those unions=-for example, along occupational or geo-graphic lines rather than by employers.If changes in the economy and the decline of existing union-

ization help create a demand for representation of nonmajorityworkers, the advent of new communication technologies, mostnotably, the Internet, makes the supply of that representationmore feasible. Historically, unions have shied away from pro-viding services to minority groups of workers because thoseworkers could not be expected to pay full dues for membershipabsent collective bargaining, and without such dues, unions



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could not afford union services, outside traditional collectivebargaining, that members would truly value. But the Internetmakes it cost-effective for unions to deliver highly specialized,individualized, and interactive services to minorities of work-ers across workplaces, and for individual workers or groups ofminorities ofworkers, essentiallywithout cost, to coordinatewitheach other without management surveillance. By reducing tonear zero the marginal cost of providing information, advice,and at least some direct service to members, and permitting con-fidential exchanges among employees and between nonmajorityworker formations and supportive" outside" unions, the Internethas fundamentally changed some of the economics of organiz-ing. Organizing should be rethought in light of it.Nor does the observation of widespread Internet use apply

only to "wired" workers in high-tech enclaves, or professionals,or even the middle class. The August 2000Current PopulationSurvey Internet and Computer Use Supplement showed that 79percent of unionized workers regularly use the Internet fromhome, as do 86 percent of nonunion workers. The percentageshave undoubtedly risen since then. For many in the minoritythat do not use the Internet, their children do. The Net is part ofeveryday life for most workers and their families.Let us underscore two points about our proposal.First, and in contrast to past abortive efforts by unions to de-

velop "associate members" by delivering non-work-related ser-vices to workers, such as low-interest credit cards, open sourceunionism would center on the representation and servicing ofworkers in their employment and role as workers. In this focus,open source unionism would be fully recognizable as unionismas traditionally understood. Itwould simply enable organizedlabortoperform this traditional function innew ways, and throughnew institutional and membership forms. The new membershipforms and institutional aspect of this is what for us is the most

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Table 1. Traditional vs. Open Source Unionism

Organization"Traditional" CollectiveBargaining-Centered,Majority Unionism

Primary activity Collective bargaining

Open SourceUnionism

Mode of buildingorganization Worker majoritiesat particular sitesPrimary organizationallinkages Locals integrated tonational unions, organized onloosely industrial lines; weakregional bodies

Individual representation andadvice; political mobilization,collective bargaining wherepossibleAny worker, anywhere,everywhere in the economy"High-tech" cyberspace,coupled with "high-touch"geographic coordination andpolitical actionPotentially many, with gradu-ated power and dues propor-tionate to commitment, andservices offeredAs long as possibleWorkplaces, Web,communitiesServices delivered byin-plant organizers,internationals, central laborcouncils, Web

Outcomes depend on collective Outcomes depend on workerbargain with employer; wages, interest and local politicalhours, working conditions, power, as well as workplaceinsurance of various kinds strength; wages, hours,working conditions, insur-ance, career advice, familiesservices, etc.


campaigns, pension moneypressure

Arbitration, strikes, slowdowns Cyber picketing, direct action,and job resistance, public public campaigns, community

pressure, pension moneypressure, "members only"arbitrationStronger, with members ableto force greater accountabilityby leaders, and in bettercommunication with eachother; more "market driven"and more decentralizedpolitical governance

Type of member One, in majority settings,generally inactive

Duration of membership As long as the CBA holdsDelivery of services Workplaces

Who/what delivers Services delivered by businessagents, stewards

Content of services

Method of dispute resolutionor tactics

Union democracy Qualified, with unions heavilybureaucratic, "top down," andunresponsive


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important difference. Itis fine for labor to armounce its opermessto workers in nontraditional (now, in fact, the majority of) work-place settings or employment relations. It is something differentto devise ways of fully integrating workers who find themselvesin such situations into the membership status and representationalroutine of a broader labor movement. Such organizational intc-.gration is the major change cormoted by open source.Second, we are not technological determinists who believe the

Web will transform unions any more than it will transform busi-ness or politics. Nor are we crackpot optimists. We recognizethat no technological irmovation, even one as sweeping as this,can by itself create a new union form, much less one that we en-visage as going beyond a technocrat's "e-union." For the opensource union to extend services to workers outside of collectivebargaining, unions will have to do more than develop a sparklingup-to-date Web site. Even cyber-supported members need somehands-on attention. Members' loyalty and willingness to act onbehalf of others, even more to recruit others, requires human con-tact and engagement and the shared experience of struggle. Towork, open source unionism must go beyond provision of infor-mation and service provided by the Net. Members must get to-gether and do things together occasionally. Union staff andorganizers will have to make sure that such events happen. Whatthe Internet provides is enormous reach and leverage on theiractions of a sort that was unimaginable even a few years ago.

Open Source Unionism in ActionHow would open source unionism actually function comparedto the traditional, majorities-based, collective-bargaining-ori-ented unionism? Table 1 summarizes some of the key differences.First, and again, the open source union would not limit its

primary activity to collective bargaining, as current unions do.



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Itwould provide information and representation to workers asindividuals and in broader political groups. Itwould organizelocals in amore diverse way than current unions do- by work-place or firm, by craft or occupation, and by geographic com-munity, depending onwhat best fits the needs ofworkers-ratherthan on the basis of NLRB determination of "appropriate bar-gaining units." Itwould try to follow the individual, not the jobor workplace or even employer-keeping contact and provid-ing services to members as they changed jobs or careers.Accordingly, organizing-the sine qua non of union growth-

would also differ between open source unionism and the currentunion form. Rather than seeking to organize workers solely atwork sites where the organizer believes it is possible to win 50+percent and a collective contract, organizers would seek mem-bers wherever workers are interested in gaining union supportand advice onworkplace problems. Organizers would turn awayno prospective member, regardless of the probability that theycould get a collective contract at the place of work. The messageto firms would be simple: Unions have chapters and memberseveryplace and they support those workers everyplace. The no-tion that firms can establish a union-free workplace by defeatingunions in NLRBelections would become ancient history.Under the new formofunionism, the meaning ofbeing a union

member would widen and grow fuzzier. Consider someone whosupports the union by providing it with contact detail such as e-mail and agrees to back the union in a particular campaign, butwho pays no dues. Member or not? What about the person whopays minimal dues-far below that of a worker covered by col-lective bargaining-but who receives services provided largelythrough the Internet at low cost to the union. Member or not?Or the activist who obtains a new job or promotion and leaveshis former coworkers but wants to remain part of the move-ment-member or not? Under collective bargaining, member-



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ship is limited to workers in a given unit, and all members arethe same. Under open source unionism, that limit on member-I': Iship would fall, and there would be greater variation in the typesof membership and service fees that resulted.The prevailing mechanism for collecting dues-by employersunder union security clauses in collectivebargaining contracts-

would obviously not fit members who lack contracts. Instead,dues or fees for services would be handled the way most fill.an-cial transactions are handled now-individually, and at a dis-

Open source unions would use cyberspace asa major tool for connecting to members anddelivering services. The union Web sitewould be the equivalent of the union hall,but open twenty-four hours a dev , seven daysa week.

tance, through the use of credit cards, bank drafts or debits, orother means. Given the ubiquity of credit cards and the ease ofmaking payments over the Internet or by mail or telephone, wesee no great administrative problem here. In fact, it may verywell bebetter for union solidarity if the worker, not the employer,directly pays the union. But it would be different.The critical question is, what sort of services can unions pro-

vide members other than majority-based collectivebargaining?Open source unions would have to ask themselves not onlywhatthey can win from management, as current unions do, but alsowhat they can deliver toworkers outside the workplace, throughthe Internet or through local communities, where any particularmanagement is irrelevant.Open source unions would use cyberspace as a major tool for



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connecting tomembers and delivering services. The union Web.: site would be the equivalent of the union hall, but open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Internet is great atdelivering information and permitting members to respond andotherwise interact with union staff and elected leaders. Theopensource 'union would necessarily place great emphasis on pro-viding members with the most accurate and up-to-date infor-mation about economic conditions affecting them. At firm-basedlocals, this capacity would require the union to gather informa-tion from members as well as to make use of the regular busi-ness and economic news services.The union would provide advice to members through fre-

quently asked questions (FAQs) and queriable online "knowl-edge-base" systems, as indeed many unions do today. Thenatural end product ofthis line of services is an artificial-intelli-gence union expert system ("Walter Reuther," the friendly unionAI robot, at your beck and call) that would respond to specificqueries. Members would click on the union expert program forinteractive sessions that would bring union expertise to work-place problems. As unions develop such services for memberswith collectivebargaining contracts, they can readily extend themat low cost for members without contracts. The services wouldalso necessarily be broader than those covered by a particularcontract, extending to information about training outside theworkplace, family services, and so on.The extent to which workers will respond to personalized in-

formation and advice is indicated by the experience of the Brit-ish union UNISON, which in 1998established UNISON-Direct,a help-line call service that provides advice and support to unionmembers eighteen hours a day, six days a week except Sunday.The advice system uses a seventeen-seat call center rather thancomputer linkages to respond to members' problems, but thecall-center workers use computerized access to more than 300



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scripts to guide members through common problems, as well asa database holding personal membership details. Union mem-bers made approximately 150,000 calls to the center in 2001, im-mediately stretching its capacity with a demand that surprisedthe union. In the United States, where a larger proportion of work-ers are on the Internet than in the United Kingdom, the naturalway to deliver many of these services would be the Internet.Still, as anyone who surfs the Web knows, there are many Web

sites that provide information about jobs and the world of work,and that do so freely. Internet recruitment firms such asMonster.com or Hotjobs.com offer advice to workers as well aslistings of jobs. Government agency Web sites contain informa-tion on laws, working conditions, and so on. Labor law firmshave FAQs on legal issues in the hope of attracting clients. Andvarious nonprofit groups offer information and advice on labormatters as on other aspects of life.But information is not representation. The latter requires de-

tailed attention to the circumstance of individual workers, theirparticular problems, their particular work setting, and the like.Such "local" knowledge can be partly gleaned through interac-tive Internet services, but will in most cases also require a unionorganizer or other staff member who can talk issues throughwith workers. Representation also means fighting for someone,not just giving automated options. And that requires organiza-tion, trust, commitment, solidarity-all those "usual" sorts ofunion things. Again, even the most advanced Internet serviceswill be no substitute for human contact, exchange, debate, andproof of presence and reliability.These observations underscore the comparative advantage of

unions in providing services of the sort that we imagine. Asrepresentatives of workers, unions have greater credibility thancommercial interests, the state, or other groups in informingworkers about what is happening at their workplace and in the



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labor market at large. Unions have the expertise to advise andlead workers about how to handle problems through collectiveaction, aswell as through individual exercise ofrights.And theyhave a bricks-and-mortar reality-live members who wouldbenefit from exchanging information and experiences. Unionsalone can combine the human network with the digital network.Because open source unions will invariably complement en-

hanced Internet servicing with face-to-facecontact, and becauseit is cost-effective to get people together locally, open sourceunionism would work best with labor's regional organizations.Without necessarily becoming "mixed lodges" like the Knightsof Labor, they suggest a bigger role particularly for central laborcouncils-to coordinate nonmajority union organizations cross-ing different work sites, to keep workers informed of relevantactivities on a community basis, to gather them for offline dis-cussion or actions. In most cities today, central labor councilsdo not effectively perform those activities, given their very lim-ited capacity. This does not make the idea of geographic com-munity-wide unionism less attractive, but rather points to theadditional capacity building that would need to be done.In the area of disputes, the open source union would typically

not have the clout inside the firm of a majority-status collectivebargaining union. But this lack does not mean that it would be apushover for management at particular workplaces, industries,or geographic areas. It would use its reputation for accuracy inproviding information to shape public discourse and tomarshalresources from outside a unit to support workers in disputes. Itcould forgemeaningful allianceswith community groups outsideitself and engage in local political activity,much as public-sectorunions did when they were governed by meet-and-confer legis-lation. And itwould be a union movement that explicitlysoughta social role and public face. Open source unions would not beable to turn inward when they faced struggle, but would have to



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look outward. They would be pressured to develop a more co-herent and attractive public face and become a more visiblesource of stewardship and moral value in the broader economy.Open source unions would gain the political clout and socialinfluence that would come of its playing a broader public role.Is There a Market for Open Source Unionism?The available evidence shows that a large proportion of theworkforcewants union representation orworkplace services thatunions are uniquely situated to give. While unions would haveto test what best meets the needs of different groups ofworkers,the magnitude of unmet worker demand for representation andhelp is so big that capturing even a small portion of it wouldmake a big difference to present membership numbers.Approximately 100million American workers-including 91

percent of the private-sector workforce-have no collective rep-resentation at work? Our mid-1990s survey of worker attitudesfound that close to 90 percent of such workers wanted someorganization speaking to their everyday concerns at work, rang-ing from unions to workplace committees of various forms (seeFigure 1). Applying those survey results to today's actualworkforce, our results specifically suggest that about 42millionworkers, or six times the size of present private-sector union mem-bership-want an organization with elected representatives andarbitration of disputes with management, for which unions arethe natural provider. Another 42million or so workers want anorganization more focused on information, career assistance, orconsultation with management, but still operating independentlyof management," The enormous representation gap in Ameri-can workplaces also extends beyond the "bread and butter" is-suesofpay and benefits-to better enforcement ofstatutory rights,more control and say in the organization ofwork and use ofnew



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Somewhatindependent

43%

Stronglyindependent

43%

Not independent No organization7% 7%

Figure 1. The Market for Representation

Based on the Worker Representation and Participation Survey questions: "Thinking nowabout any kind of employee organization, not just unions, how would you like it to work?it was your decision alone to make, and everybody went along with it, would you prefer aorganization that can use an outside referee or arbitrator to settle issues?An organization iwhich management makes the final decisions about issues?An organization in which thekey participants are volunteers? An organization in which key participants are elected? Anorganization in which the key participants are appointed by management?" Respondentswere coded "strongly independent" if their desired organization had elected representativesand arbitrat ion of disputes; "somewhat independent" if they favored weaker combinationsarbitration and representative selection (e.g., volunteer representatives with or without .arbitration); "not independent" if they chose both management selection of representativesand settlement of disputes; "no organization" if they expressed no desire for representationon any of the above questions. See Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, What WorkersWant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), Exhibit 7.2.

technology,better accessto training or other careerassistance, andbetter information on the company, among other concerns.But we need not rely on surveys to see the demand for repre-

sentation. Consider the number ofworkers who contact unions,vote for union representation inNLRBelections that unions lose,or report favorable past experience with unions even thoughthey now hold a nonunion job. These, too, disappear almost en-tirely from membership today. In the private sector, approxi-mately twice asmany workers are past union members aspresentones. These former members are modestly more inclined thanother nonunion workers to say they would "vote union tomor-



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row" if given a chance, and close to 40 percent of them reporttheir past experience with unions as "very good" (14 percent) or"good" (24 percent)." Putting these numbers together, there aretwo-thirds as many former members (excluding retirees) whohad good or very good experiences with unions as there are cur-rent members." Surely, a substantial proportion of those work-ers would be favorably inclined toward some affiliation withthe union movement. But at present, there is no place for them.Again, different workers prefer different forms of workplace

organization, depending largely on the labor practices of theiremployer. But the numbers behind any of the different formsare so big that even partial capture of them would substantiallyraise current union membership totals. For example, if just onein ten of the workers who say they want elected representativesand arbitration joined an open source labor movement, private-sector union membership would increase by 50 percent. If justone in ten of the workers who say they would "vote for a uniontomorrow" joined, it would increase it by 30 percent. If just onein ten of the workers who have been unionized in the past andreported it as a "good" or "very good" experience joined again,membership would increase by 7 percent.Does the Law Support It?Unions generally behave as if the only members worth havingare majority members in an exclusive collective bargaining rela-tionship with an employer, and they seem to believe that onlyworkers in those organizations are protected by law. They fearthat inviting workers to join minority union organizationsamounts to a "children's crusade" inviting innocents to slaugh-ter. This self-limiting conception of unionism is at odds withAmerican labor history and established labor law.In terms of history, nonmajority or "members only" unionism



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was once common in the United States and widely used byunions as a natural platform for additional organizing." In the1880sthe Knights of Labor established "mixed lodges" that in-cluded workers from many occupations and firms in the samegeographic area as well as single-craft-based lodges. The earlyorganizing of most of the industrial trades, and of early indus-trial unions like the mineworkers and steelworkers, rested cen-trallyon "members only" minority organizations. In the 1960sand 1970spublic-sector unionism developed fromminority rep-resentation in organizations that did not bargain collectively.Teachers unions grew to several million in membership, for ex-ample, initially off agreements negotiated only with membersofnonmajority associations. The same is true of many state andlocal employee unions, which achieved some size and powerunder "meet and confer" provisions in state laws. These lawsdid not impose binding duties to bargain on employers or re-strict the bargains made to majority organizations.On the legal side, there is a widespread perception that U.S.

labor law greatly privileges union activity when a majority ofworkers support the union, whereas workers in unions withoutmajority support have little or no protection. This perception iswrong on at least two counts.The first is that, in fact, the law provides very little protectionof workers from aggressive anti-union employers. The provi-

sions of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) are neitherpunitive nor self-enforcing. Employer violations of the law goon routinely-tens of thousands of basic violations a year-andlargely with impunity, with enormous delays even in gettingthe administrative "remedy" of an order to the employer to be-have. Many employers do not respect the letter and spirit of theact.Virtually all organizing drives feature some sort ofemployerharassment of union supporters. Virtually all include "captiveaudience" speeches to workers-from which unions or workers

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supporting them are excluded-that warn workers of the dan-gers ofvoting union. And there is a continual flow of more overtillegal employer action against worker efforts of workers to or-ganize, including outright firing for their union support.Awell-resourced anti-union employer can, with sufficient ef-fort, prevent all but the most dedicated workers from gaining a

union even when they want it. If the employer does not defeata union in an organizing drive, it can stall in bargaining or sim-ply close a facility. The present law has no way to deal withthis behavior. The weakness of the law is indeed one of thereasons unionism cannot grow out of the currently organizedghetto.This conclusion brings us to the second point. Acknowledg-

ing the above, the fact is that the law protects the concerted ac-tivity ofworkers to engage inunion activity regardless ofwhetherthey have minority or majority status. Commonly, unions thinkotherwise. They are simply wrong in doing so.The crucial statement of worker rights in the National Labor

Relations Act is found in.its7:Employees shall have the right to self organization, to form, join andassist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representa-tives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activi-ties, for the purpose of collective bargain or o th er m utu al a id a nd p ro te ctio n.(italics added)This provision covers all workers who "concert" to deal with

issues as a group. There is nothing in it about majority or minor-ity status. Moreover, as the italicized phrase above indicates, thelaw is open-ended on the form and function of such collectiveactivity.All the protections of the NLRAapply toworkers activein nonmajority situations, which include, among others: protec-tion fromdiscrimination against union activity, the right to strikewithout being discharged, the right to present demands and re-quest negotiations with management, the right to designate



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union stewards, and the right to bargain and make a collectiveagreement for members. In addition, members of the union canrefuse to discuss terms and conditions of employment with theemployer and insist that negotiations be with their union repre-sentative and that fellow employees or union representativesaccompany them at disciplinary proceedings. They can act to-gether to enforce statutory rights of immediate application toworkplace situations-for example, OSHA rights. And uniondues money can be spent in political canvassing and communi-cating with minority members as much as it can with membersin a majority collectivebargaining relationship.In short, the legal protection for union organization applies

identically to members of minority unions as to members of ma-jority unions. Indeed, it applies to workers acting together ab-sent any formal union organization.How, then, does majority status change anything at law?For the union, it imposes the power and responsibility of "ex-

clusive representation" for all workers in the unit-includingthe "duty of fair representation" of workers who oppose it. Forthe employer, Section9of the NLRAestablishes the "exclusivityprinciple" that a union showing majority support is the onlyone with whom the employer should deal. Along with the8(a)(2)ban on "company muons," tillsprovisionwas introducedas a remedy to the situation of the mid-1930s tomid-1940swhenAFL and CIa unions were often at war with each other for thesame workers, and when some employers created unions thatthey dominated. The law says that the union with majorityworker support takes all, and that the employer should stay outof picking winners and losers, or fabricating winners of its own.Bargaining, meanwhile, is statutorily presumed to proceed ingood faith. Employer violation of such duty is an unfair laborpractice under 8(a)(5)of the NLRA.It is uncertain whether this last "duty to bargain" applies



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to nonmajority unions. Nothing in the statute says that it doesnot, and neither the NLRB nor the courts has ever directlyruled as such. Indeed, the legislative and drafting history ofthe NLRA shows that its framers formulated, and then re-jected, language that would have so limited the duty to bar-gainY But the practice of nonmajority unionism has been solong neglected in the private sector that legal clarification isprobably needed."But whatever its precise legal status regarding nonmajority

unions, the" duty tobargain" getsmajorityunions relatively littleanyway. Likeeverything else in the NLRA,violation of the pro-vision carries no punitive remedy. Itmerely produces .an orderto commence lawful behavior. And the force of this directive issuggested by the current failure of some one-third of newly or-ganized sites even to get to first contract. The "duty to bargain"is, at best, a "duty to talk and talk." Worker power, not the stat-ute, forces an unwilling employer to agreement, just as workerpower, more than the law, decides every other aspect of collec-tivebargaining and recognition dealings.In sum, workers acting together in nonmajority unions are at

law treated identically as workers in majority unions in all oftheir union activities, save perhaps for the duty tobargain, whichis tooweak to gain unions much in any case.Butthere is an important operational difference,which comes

from the potential extent of open source unionism. A smallstruggling union in one work site may have little power tooppose employer abuse, given the lack of effective protectionof the law. But if it is connected to many other similarly situ-ated nonmajority unions in the same sector or geographic lo-cale, and to a base of internationals with a hold on somemajority settings, and to a range of community and othergroups that think of themselves as part of its fight, the balanceof power will be quite different.



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Can Unions Reach the Market?

The best evidence for the ability of unions to develop this newform of unionism that we suggest-exploiting modern technol-ogy and enlarging the meaning of membership-is found in thegrowing activity of innovative unions in the United States andother countries with similar labor relations systems: the UnitedKingdom, Australia, and Canada. We summarize briefly a fewsuch examples here."The most striking example of an open source union at a tradi-

tional nonunion firm isAlliance@IBM(www.allianceibm.org), achartered local of the Communication Workers of America(CWA).Alliance@IBMdeveloped from Web-based protests byIBMemployees in response to IBM's 1999unilateral change inthe cOlnpany pension system, which greatly harmed some fu-ture retirees. The workers protested in chat rooms and sound-.ing boards around the Web, impelling IBM to restore some ofthe pension benefits. Alliance@IBMhas a small number of vot-ing members, a larger number of "subscribers" to e-mail mes-sages and visitors to its Web site. The Alliance site providesdiscussion groups, mailing lists, links to related sites, and infor-mation about company issues of concern to workers-all devel-oped by localmembers. Among the Internet-based accomplish-ments of IBM workers was an e-mail campaign to raise theallowance per mile driven for IBMcustomer engineers, who payfor their own vehicle costs when traveling to repair customermachines. When management did not respond to individualcomplaints about rising costs, the customer engineers planned aone-day e-mail and phone-call campaign to contact the man-ager in charge. The one-day campaign succeeded in getting themileage allowance increased."An extended union that is closer to a craft union or occupa-

tional association is WashTech (www.washtech.org), also asso-



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ciated with the CWA, which represents the interests of SiliconValley and related high-tech industry workers. This organiza-tion raised the issue of overtime pay for contract employees atMicrosoft and other firms that hire many software engineers ascontractors. Itprovides discounted-cost training courses, infor-mation about developments in the industry on its Web site, con-tract advice, and legislative advocacy. It delivers the WashTechNews, a free digest of news, bimonthly via e-mail to subscriberswho are promised that the list membership will be kept confi-dential. The form for subscribing says, "Yes! I support the basicgoals of WashTech and believe that workers need a collectivevoice in the high-tech industry. Please subscribe me to theWashTech News," which aligns the subscribers with the union.Another example is theAustralian ITWorkersAlliance establishedinOctober 2001(www.itworkers-alliance.org). As their Web site ex-plains, "The idea of the ITWorkers Alliance is to provide a space forIT workers to share information and ideas and receive advice onworkplace issues" and to "create a culture that workers will wantto be part of" rather than simply "attempting to recruit membersup front." It includes a forum for discussion, news about the in-formation technology sector, information on independent con-tractor issues, and numerous frequently asked question (FAQs)sections so that the IT workers learn about their rights and waysto redress problems. Three weeks after the launch of the ITWork-ers Alliance, the Australian Computer Society (ACS) formed aspecial-interest group for contractors in New South Wales, indi-cating that the IT specialists took the new union seriously.Outside IT,the National Writers Union (NWU, www.nwu.org),

which is part of the United Automobile Workers, has organizedsome 7,000 freelance writers, for whom it provides informationand generic assistance via the Web. The writers are spread outaround the country and across the world, so the union almosthas to deliver services to them via the Internet. The NWU views



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its web site as the IIcyberspace equivalent of the union hall wheremembers (and prospective members) can find the informationthey need and conduct union business." The NWU e-mails theentire membership several times a month, and itsWebsite aver-aged some 125,000page views a month in early 2001.The siteincludes a national job hotline, which lists freelance writingprojects that members can apply for. In 2001, the NWU won aSupreme Court case on copyrights of written material on theWeb against the New York Times. In addition to constantly up-dating itsWebsite, which it regards asa common gathering placeformembers, NWU e-mails the entire membership several timesa month. One basic service, also Web-maintained, is a nationaljob hotline that lists freelance writing projects that members canapply for."Workers in these settings are unlikely to gain a collective con-

tract-indeed, neither the NWU nor the Australian ITAlliancehas any intention of seeking such. But these unions can becomepermanent fixtures in their company or occupation-a union atIBM!-and can affect the way the companies treat those work-ers as well as help build a greater labor movement.Such formations can alsobe tied tounions with majority collec-

tive bargaining status, perhaps organized at the same employer.The CWA has developed WAGE (Workers at GE, www.geworkersuruted.org), a new organization for workers not cov-ered by collective bargaining at that company, in part by linkingthem to the minority ofGE'snational workforce that isunder col-lective bargaining contract. This case shows the natural links be-tween an ongoing union-organizing drive and the extension ofthe reach of that drive through new services and networking tounorganized workers, supported by the established coreofunionworkers under contract. WAGEinvites GEworkers from aroundthe world to "join us in building worker power at this mammothcorporation" and offers them online ability to sign on as mem-



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bers.Thiseffort-which seamlesslycombinesmessages fromfour-teen different international unions on a Web site offered in En-glish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese--shows whatcanbe done on the Internet to organize. It suggests what a combi-nation of traditional, nonmajority, and Internet-supported or -linked open source unionism might look like.On the geographic front, King County Labor Council in Se-

attle (www.kclc.org) or Progressive Wisconsin (www.progressivewisconsin.org) explicitly extends the bounds of tra-ditional union activity to embrace a wider community. KingCounty Labor Council, like many other CLCs, has developed avyeb site that increasingly functions as a broader communitymeans of communication around political programs, organiz-ing,and other activities. Progressive Wisconsinisbuilding a state-wide" activist list" ofprogressives for regular postings-programsupport, with explicit coordination between labor and outsidegroups, to create a statewide cyber-based progressive commu-nity. By bringing different pro-labor groups together, these or-ganizations represent the extension that characterizes opensource unionism.Extending services in a different direction, in the United King-

dom, UNISON has worked with the National Union of Studentsto develop a Web site that provides information and advice onwork-related problems tostudent workers (www.troubleatwork.org.uk). The site contains contact information to unions, but itsessence is freeprovision ofunion expertise to a largely nonuniongroup. Given the success ofunion-student activist collaborationsin the United States, it would be natural to extend membershipto activist students, even though they themselves may not beworking in a collective bargaining setting.Finally,recognizing that some local union services can best bedelivered to members over the Web, SEIUhas developed LocalsonLine (www.localsonline.org), which provides Website design

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and other technical assistance to them. This program benefits theinternational as well as locals, since the international cannow ef-fectivelybroadcast toindividual members through theconsistentlyformatted local sites, all manner of updates, legislative analysis,trainingmaterials, and other things.There isnothing in thesekindsof services that requires collectivebargaining. SEIUcould at lowcost provide the same technical assistance to union activists atwork sites that failed to gain majority representation.These examples are just the tip of an iceberg of what innova-

tive unions, union activists, and union-associated groups aredoing today. Extrapolated into the near future, they show thatat least some unions are moving in the direction of open sourceunionism. No single union has put all the pieces together to cre-ate the full-fledged new form that we envisage, but there isenough experience to demonstrate that this form is not "pie inthe sky." Whether job-based, occupation-based, international!local-union-based, or geographically based, the Internet has be-come a way of mobilizing and organizing workers and laborand broader communities, and ofdelivering union services thatdid not exist even a few years ago.The examples show some of the unique advantages unions

have as providers of information and as a mode for workers'informing others about particular conditions. Unions potentiallyhave accessto the "localknowledge" that millions ofwired work-ers can provide. Members trust their union in ways they wouldnot trust other organizations. In theWebworld, where firms paymillions to develop a brand, unions already have the high vis-ibility and network gains that come of that. Open source unionscould easily gain a reputation as being the best source of accu-rate and up-to-date data about trends and opportunities in theworld of work, and as the place for workers in work sites notcovered by collective bargaining to go to for advice, representa-tion, and assistance in struggles with employers, if necessary.



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Seizing the Opportunity

For some, our suggestion of a new form of unionism may seemsimply to extend and name impulses already evident in the la-bor movement. For others, it may seem a radical suggestion,threatening theestablished routines and governance ofAmerica'sgreatest social movement. We intend it to be both.Certainly many in labor recognize that present unionism is

ill-equipped to deal with today's economy and politics. Whileunionism based on collectivebargaining does millions ofwork-ers much good, it cannot expand in the private sector with cur-rent economic and political realities. Trade unions cannot takeup new positions in the economy as fast as they occur, and theycontinually loseportions of their older base-not because work-ers have turned against them, but typically because the firm it-self has changed and because they face strong employeropposition. Politically unions generally playa defensive gameat the national level, which has little or no chance of helpingthem reestablish their position in the private sector.Thisarticlehas offered a new way for unions to relate towork-

ers, to develop alternative means to represent them, and to ex-tend themselves to surrounding communities which-givenlabor's declining clout with business-is necessary tomake sub-stantive gains for workers.Open source unionism provides new worker representation

concretely as nonmajority and individual representation, andways to sustain representation by combining services throughthe Internet and representation through geographic proximityand action. While it does not give all of the answers to labor'sproblems-employers who fight tooth and nail against unionsthat seek collectivebargaining contracts will fight against opensource unions-it does offer a way to change the locus of orga-nizing battles and toopen unions toworkers currently excluded.



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The same cannot be said for "doing more of the same."Open source unionism would bedisruptive ofestablished union

structures. This should not be as dramatic as the fight of the AFLwith the Knights of Labor, or the CIO with the AFL, or of theemergence of public-sector unions with a labor movement thatfirst thought of them as weak employee associations rather thanreal unions. But it would induce tension, as labor seeks to changeits own way of doing business to get better aligned with the realeconomy, and the thoughts and concerns of working familieswithin it.The new form would disrupt settled attitudes and routines

and shift power in unions. Itwould open the door of the houseof labor to many workers and groups that would create changesgreater than those the current AFL-CIO leadership team hasstruggled to effectuate. Itwould threaten the hegemony of unionfunctionaries heavily invested in the old bureaucratic system andunwilling to embrace the new form. Union Web sites would bemore open to criticism of leadership. Members outside of collec-tive bargaining would demand greater attention to local politi-cal activities and labor-community alliances that could influencetheir work sites. Weak and often ineffective regional bodies, no-tably CLCs, would have to be strengthened, which could pro-duce new intermediate union associations that would furthershake up the existing dominance of the traditional nationals.The new form of unionism would be a less inner-directed labor

movement, and a more experimental one. Itwould be less cen-tered on actions at particular work sites and more on represent-ing workers broadly in their career and economic life.Thiswouldgive it a different look and feeland organizational culture. Unionleaders and activists providing advice and assistance would playa greater role than lawyers negotiating contracts. As open sourceunions sought reach in the society and economy, labor would be-come more decentralized and varied in how it operated and less



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respectful of settled union routines on policing jurisdiction."But these difficultiesnotwithstanding, if our analysis is correct,

unions could make considerable progress by pushing further thenew form,beit firm based, industry based, orgeographicallybased.Thecostwould bemodest compared to the costs involved in stan-dard organizing campaigns. The technical expertise exists withinvirtually every union today.Youngactivists and volunteers couldberecruited atworkplaces fromthe millionswho want unions andcannot gain union representation under the current system.Are we certain open source would work? No, of course not.

But we think the argument here (improved, we hope, by oth-ers), and the failure of present strategies, should shift the bur-den of evidence against those who would not be willing even togive it a serious try."And what might that look like? Concretely,the AFL-CIO,or some consortium ofmember unions, or a singlemember, for that matter, could develop a limited series of tests.Pick out some firms that have been giving unions trouble for along time-Beverly nursing homes, Compaq computers, Sprint,and so on. Pick out one or two rnajor industries where organiz-ing has been a challenge-health care,financial services, foodprocessing. Pick out a handful of cities with CLCs with activeUnion Cities programs and some other signs of life-LA, Cleve-land, SanJose, Seattle, Milwaukee-or offer participation in thiseffort, asSEIUdid with Locals on Line,with any CLC interestedin making the effort.In each case, the moving labor organization would gather to-

gether people knowledgeable ofworker demographics and con-cerns in those areas, do a "power map" of sorts about criticalplayers, develop a range of relevant content and mechanismsfor interaction with feedback from online. The union would getagreements in each "site"-be it firm, industry, or geography-on the division between direct actions and gatherings of work-ers and the provision of Internet-based material. Itwould train



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some staff and gain volunteer activists to manage the differentWeb sites and communication infrastructure, and perhaps setup a centralized call center to permit off-line assistance and han-dling of questions (1-800or 888GO CYBER).If this cost a lot of money, it would be a sign that something isgoingwrong. The key to Internet-based organizing and communi-

cation isnot expensive hardware or software, but content: invitingpeople into an attractive experience,getting committed volunteersand activists talking to others who share it. And developing con-tent is a matter of finding out what workers want and need, andproviding them with the tools to develop matters on their own.If initial tests were successful, the union innovators would

benefit from network economies, as workers in different work-places learned about what others were doing. There would be abuzz that unions were embarked on something new and excit-ing and experimental and that they wanted help from others indoing it best. In place of the dismal news about falling densityor membership would come a very different sort of news: newand different members joining a new and different sort of orga-nization. Most important, the process of unionization in theUnited States would change from a world where managementhas disproportionate power to determine who is or is not a unionmember to aworld where workers would have that powel~onceagain. Opening up unions, making it easier for the millions whowant union services and representation to join unions, at differ-ent levels and in different ways, is what open source unionismis all about. "The new un ion m ovem en t. W orking for a ll workers,everywhere." Ithas a nice ring, doesn't it?Notes

1. The industrial structure has changed since the early twentieth century. Buteven the direction of that difference-from craft to industrial, albeit often service,production-does not brighten the implied assessment of present union fortunes.



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Private unionization today is below levels not seen since a largely "premodern"American economy during the first years of the twentieth century. The same cannotbe said of any other advanced industrialized country.

2. This prediction is based on a stock-flow model of union organization of thesort that economists typically use to assess union growth. The model treats mem-bership as a stock, and new organizing as an investment, and allows for the natural"depreciation" of the stock of members through the natural closure of plants. Asnoted in the text, we assume that about a third of newly organized sites fail to reachfirst contract, and ordinary rates of decline or disappearance in existing sites aredue to "natural" economic change.

3. The largest such affiliations that year came from the California State Employ-ees Association (175,000) and the United American Nurses (100,000).

4. Of course, organizing at this scale would likely change the cost rules, but thedirection of that is unclear. On the one hand, economies of scale could reduce per-new-member costs (though we also think this unlikely without innovations in mem-bership suggested here). On the other, the likely anti-union management campaignthat such an effort would stimulate might easily raise the per capita costs. In anycase, the money needed vastly exceeds what is currently being spent or that unionsas a whole show any intention of spending.5. On strengthening regional bodies, see the activities of the New Alliance, UnionCities, Union Community Fund, and related efforts, centered in the Department ofField Mobilization. On the economic development and pension work, we have inmind the work of the Department of Corporate Affairs, and its allied Center forWorking Capital and Working for America Institute.

6. We chose this name after some debate, but are not wedded to it. If anyone hasa better one, that is more than fine with us. We toyed with "network," "networked,"and "extended" unionism, and "extended network," as in Paul Osterman, Tho-mas A. Kochan, Richard M. Locke, and Michael Piore, W orking in A merica: A B lue-prin t fo r th e N ew Labor M arket (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), which makes anargument analogous to our own. Despite its possibly "trendy" cyber sound, how-ever, we settled on "open source" as signaling some of the Internet use that wethink important, and as best conveying the spirit of the proposal, which is to seekand harness pro-union energies anywhere they are to be found, and to link them inconstruction of the common project of restoring worker voice in American affairs.

7. In 2000 there were 120 million employed wage and salary workers: 104 mil-lion nonunion members and 16 million union members. In the private sector, therewere 102 million workers, 9 million in unions and 93 million not in unions.

8. See Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, W hat W orkers W ant (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1999). Other claims about worker attitudes made here, unless oth-erwise footnoted, can be assumed to come from this same source.

9. The majority of ex-members viewed their experience as mixed, while 13 per-cent described it as bad and 12 percent as very bad (ibid., P: 74).10. In our 1994-1995 survey there were 1.45 times as many ex-members as mem-bers, but since then, private-sector density has fallen from 10.9 percent to 9 percent,which would raise the number of ex-members and lower the number of members.Our estimate is a crude one.

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11. In this paragraph and throughout this discussion, we draw on Clyde Sum-mers, "UnionsWithout Majority-A BlackHole?" Ch ic ag o-Ke nt L aw R e vi ew 66(1990):531--48.This important work has since spawned a small industry of law reviewarticles on minority unionism, with important contributions made by, in te r a lia ,Samuel Estreicher,Matthew Finkin, Alan Hyde, and, most recently,Charles Morris.

12.Here webenefit from Charles Morris's painstaking reconstruction of this his-tory, as presented in his D em ocracy at W ork: R estoring the R ight of Associa tion in theAm er ic an W o rk pla ce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

13. Summers thinks that contrary understanding or practice has gone on longenough that explicit statutory amendment is required to clarify this right. Morris,while welcoming NLRBclarification of it, emphatically disagrees on any need forsuch amendment. Our own view is that the statute isclear,and the burden ofamend-ment should be on those who would wish to deny the right. What is most impor-tant in any case is to get some practice going-that is, to attempt things withnonmajority organizations-before turning it over to the lawyers.

14.See Richard B. Freeman and Wayne J.Diamond, "Will Unionism Prosper inCyber-Space? The Promise of the Internet for Employee Organization," NationalBureau ofEconomicResearch,working paper 8483(www.nber.org/papers/w8483).See also reports on and proceedings from the May 2001 conference, jointly spon-sored by the Harvard TradeUnion Program, the London School ofEconomics, andthe British Trade Unions Congress, on "Unions and the Internet," available atwww.htup.harvard.edu.

15. See Linda Guyer, "Real World Experiences of Online Organizing," Unionsand the Internet Conference, London, May 11-12,2001(www.allianceibm.org).

16.SeeBruceHartford, "Riding the Internet," presented atUnions and the InternetConference, London, May 21-22, 2001(www.allianceibm.org).

17.Jurisdiction is far from a "settled" issue inside labor and continues to impedea vast amount of organizing, with raiding still common and, even more common,unions "sitting" on their declared area ofjurisdiction without organizing workerswithin it, but resisting the attempts ofothers todo so. At the AFL-CIO,meanwhile,the consolidation ofmany internationals has not been associated with comparableconsolidation ofpower to adjudicate their disputes. Solabor appears more central-ized than in the past, but still behaves in a highly fragmented way. In addition,some of the dispute over jurisdiction is driven by familiar changes in industrialstructure. With more people working in doctors' offices than steel mills, for ex-ample, it's not surprising that unions representing workers in traditional industriesare looking tomove out beyond their original jurisdiction.

18.Nor are we alone in thinking so, even as applied to a national labor move-ment. See the recommendations of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC)s Pro-moting Trade Unionism TaskGroup, "Reaching the missing millions," submittedin September 2001 (www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/tuc-3642-fO.cfm).

T o o rd er re pr in ts , c all 1 -8 00- 35 2-2 21 0; o uts id e th e U nite d S ta te s, c all 717-632-3535.

http://www.htup.harvard.edu./http://www.htup.harvard.edu./

Open Source Unionism

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