Mobilizing Worker Rights: The Challenges of Claims-Driven Processes for Re-Regulating the Labor Market

Low-wage workers continue to face high levels of exploitation in the workplace. The regulatory frameworks that exist to protect workers and provide avenues for redress for violations of workers’ rights rely on individual or collective claims-making by workers. Worker centers have developed creative mobilization strategies to support worker claims and build worker power in the low-wage labor market. This paper leverages qualitative case study data to better understand the process of worker claims-making and the psychosocial toll it can take on workers. Based on these case studies, this paper argues that worker centers and other alt-labor groups need to take into account the costs and challenges for workers endemic to the claims-making process under current regulatory regimes.

The Effect of “Federal -Aid Swap” Programs and Davis-Bacon Prevailing Wages on Highway Construction Costs and Contractor Composition: Evidence From Iowa

“Federal-aid swap” programs allow states and local governments to bypass federal Davis-Bacon prevailing wages and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) goals by exchanging federal funds that have been allocated to highway projects with state funds. The Iowa Department of Transportation approved a federal-aid swap program in February 2018. Using data on more than 1,200 highway construction projects in Iowa from 2016 to 2020, I find that the cost of projects in the federal-aid swap program are not statistically different from those that were not swapped, after accounting for project size and complexity, project type, and project location. Regression results indicate that Davis-Bacon prevailing wages and DBE goals have no effect on total construction costs. However, the federal-aid swap program is statistically associated with a decrease in the likelihoods that a project is covered by the Davis-Bacon Act by 10 percentage points and DBE goals by 4 percentage points. Because the payment of Davis-Bacon prevailing wages is statistically associated with an 8 percentage-point decrease in the chances that a highway project is awarded to an out-of-state contractor, the federal-aid swap program may have increased the market share of out-of-state contractors at the expense of Iowa-based contractors.

Union Activism and the Baseball Hall of Fame Voting Process: Labor-Management Conflict and Media Bias

Media bias is well documented in the industrial relations domain. This paper extends this research by exploring whether union participation among former professional baseball players affects the likelihood of moving through two stages of the selection process for the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame (HOF), a selection process controlled by sports media. At the HOF ballot inclusion stage, union activism increased position players’ and pitchers’ likelihoods of inclusion, regardless of time period. Conversely, at the HOF voting stage, position players who were union representatives during labor-management conflict (i.e., strikes and lockouts) received significantly less votes than non-activists, while position players who were representatives during labor-management cooperation received significantly more votes. Union activism did not affect pitchers at this stage. We conclude that union activists can be subject to negative media bias during labor-management conflict that, in turn, negatively affects post-employment outcomes.

Gleaning the Fields of Higher Education: Exercises of an Adjunct Self and Instructional Precaritization

The use of adjunct faculty in higher education has become a widely discussed labor practice. The voices of adjuncts are largely absent in this inquiry and advocacy, an absence which wrongly suggests adjuncts a lack voice or of agency. In the first part of this piece, I argue that adjuncts should contribute to their field of inquiry to destabilize the notions of contingent instructional workers as mere classroom proctors, in need of others’ advocacy. In the second part, I relate episodes of adjuncts disregarded and embraced on their campuses. Stemming from years of teaching in higher education and adjunct organizing, this piece is written from an adjunct perspective, exploring the disregard and embrace adjuncts encounter in their institutional lives. Following Foucault's exercises of the self as part of a philosophical life, I call the academic productions of adjuncts “gleaning,” an exercise taken on by professors that enacts a philosophical project in the face of de-professionalization and precaritization. This critical and ethical intervention counterbalances managerial practices that dismiss adjunct labor and normalize the process of dismissal. Adjunct gleaning, I conclude, may never transform the two-tiered instructional system, though their cultural and intellectual production will hamper efforts to dismiss adjuncts’ presence and catalog them as agents of precarious survival.