Unions, Work, & Labor from Ethnographic & Interpretive Perspectives

• In Event: Shared Goals, Diverse Approaches: Methodological Pluralism in Labor Studies

Abstract

What does attention to the lived experiences of political actors offer for scholars seeking to understand the modern context of labor and labor unions?

For those who follow the U.S. labor movement, the past decade has offered a number of tantalizing promises: the rise worker-led “alt-labor” organizations, widespread strikes by teachers within a “common good” framework (and an increase in labor action across the board), and poll data that suggests majorities of young people are interested in unionization regardless of political party affiliation. At the same time, overall union density and the rate of elections continue to decline against the backdrop of a political administration openly hostile to labor unions—an administration that won a substantial minority of union member support in 2016.

Given the continued presence of unions in the US, we might expect them to be actively organizing in fast growing, low wage sectors, especially if disgruntled workers and poor working conditions are widespread. While the calls for revitalization have been legion, unions have been unable to combat the continual loss of membership. Between a neoliberal political economy entrenched in both parties, an economy that continually moves out of step with their legal and structural strengths, and a model that struggles with low-wage workers, unions face a tough external context. At the same time, we cannot ignore that unions must share some of the responsibility for their own demise. While scholars, activists, and union leadership have called for widespread organizing and a return to social movement activism, most locals seem unable to transcend a conservative, risk-averse, and myopic approach that frames unions mainly as service providers to membership. To be sure, unions continue to organize and win elections, and some have even seen small growth. On the whole, however, there is scant evidence to predict a significant revival of union membership any time soon.

In this paper I offer alternative approaches to studying labor and the labor movement. If we are interested not only in what views, preferences, and identities workers self-report to researchers, but also the development of contexts, frames, and discourses, ethnographic and immersive research offers a ready vehicle. Ethnographic approaches allow for the study and analysis of labor from the inside out, enabling researchers to explore how political actors—
workers, unionists, employers, and political entrepreneurs—understand political contexts themselves, and how these understandings lead to particular positions and decisions within those contexts. With long term and/or immersive projects, fieldwork provides analytic leverage in tracking dynamic political processes, allowing researchers to see how actors interpret changes and develop over time. Together, these qualities can provide leverage for researchers to explore how workers and organizers develop, deploy, and take up varying frames.

Further, an ethnographic approach gives researchers the ability to understand how actors interpret the political world in ways that are ambiguous, conflictual, at odds with societal norms, or dismissive of empirical reality. In a political arena where conflicts over truth claims can dominate much of the discussion, immersive fieldwork gives researchers an opportunity to observe this process as it happens, and to examine how political actors use differing claims to make sense of the political world. Thus, the process is one of understanding not just what matters to political actors, but why certain phenomena matter (and why others do not), and how the process of making a phenomenon meaningful has political outcomes. For the study of labor, such an approach has much to offer, especially given the distance between the public face and concrete practices of many labor organizations.

I draw on three research projects to flesh out this argument: (1) ethnographic research of a 2018 congressional campaign with explicit left-economic populist themes; (2) a 2017 interview project with Trump voters in a formerly Union-centric slice of the rust-belt, and (3) a two year ethnographic project with an urban worker center focused on low-income immigrant food workers.

Author

• Biko Koenig, Franklin & Marshall College