Learning from the enemy? Internal union restructuring and the imitation of management strategies

This dissertation examines the strategies of three major construction workers' unions in the US and Germany: the IBEW, UBC and the IG BAU. The study investigates the factors which enable unions to implement innovative practices and which—in turn—have the potential to improve labors' prospects for revitalization. In focusing on the construction industry, a sector for a long time considered to be little hospitable to innovation, the dissertation analyzes the causes for some striking incidents of innovative union practices which occurred throughout the 1990s. While the thesis dismisses potential explanations for these incidents such as the positive impact of alliances with social movements, a favorable shift in legislation, or in external factors such as labor markets, it argues for an explanation which emphasizes the positive impact of comprehensive internal union restructuring and tests this hypothesis in two major fields of union policy: membership organizing and collective bargaining. The research strategy included: the analysis of secondary literature, the analysis of union documents, and 35 in-depth interviews with union officials, with leading experts in the field of construction, as well as with representatives of employers'/contractors' associations. The author finds strong support for the influences of comprehensive internal restructuring on their ability to introduce innovative union practices. While innovative practices vary widely, ranging from the introduction of European-level collective bargaining, the shifting from local to regional level collective bargaining to powerful membership organizing drives it could be shown that they were resting on initiatives of restructuring, which were established prior to innovating. In both countries unions introduced a similar set of measures for internal restructuring, including changes in the formal hierarchy of the organization, new practices for the management of the unions' human resources, and new forms of work organization. To diffuse such measures within their own organization—the analysis reveals—union leadership selectively referred to concepts of business administration and thus successfully economized the union organization. While external pressures supported union reform in that they raised the level of urgency, the selective adaptation of concepts of business administration proved to be crucial in that it legitimized leadership-driven restructuring and thus gave restructuring focus and direction.