The Assimilation of Labor Unions into the Administrative Structure of American Society
The "right to work," "fair labor practices," "equal pay for equal work," and "non-discrimination" are terms that have become so integrated into the vocabulary of administrative specialists in the United States that the historical impact of those terms have become only a dim memory, usually of interest solely to the historian. This analysis will look at some of the critical labor laws of the past, and after discussing their current validity, try to determine their importance to the present-day role of the administrator. This analysis is organized in the following manner: Section 1: Labor Past and Present; Section 2: Major Labor Laws Impacting Current Administrative Theory; Section 3: The Challenges of Integration of Fair Labor Practices; and Section 4: Personal Observations.
The organized labor movement in the United States has had an extremely cyclical history, arising from obscurity at the turn of the century, it became a potent force in the 1920s, waned in power during the 1930s, became powerful again in the 1940s and 1950s, fell off again in the 1960s and 1970s, and is currently attempting to regain some of its former strengths (Gapasin & Yates, 1997, 46-49).
Gapasin and Yates (1997) analyze the challenges to American labor within the context of the 1995 AFL-CIO announcement of "New Voice" leadership which "promised nothing less than the re-creation of a labor movement" (47). Clearly this is an overwhelming job. The number of US employees who are members of labor unions is currently quite low compared to other countries, and in comparison "with what it once was here" (Gapasin & Yates, 1997, 47).
The test of union's strength is measured in density percentages (the number of workers in unions versus the work force as a whole. Gapasin and Yates (1997) point out that the U.S. density has been declining since the mid-1950s and...