The White-Collar Union Organizer and The Frustrated Labor Historians

The paper will discuss minicases on ‘The White-Collar Union Organizer’ and ‘The Frustrated Labor Historians’ by Arthur A. Sloane and Fred Witney (2010), to understand the issues unions undergo in the marketplace. There is no predetermined statistical number reported of union memberships in this country. However, “the United Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) excludes almost 2 million U.S wages and salary employees, over half of whom are employed in the public sector, who are represented at their workplaces by a union but are not union members. Not being required to join a union as a condition of continued employment, these employees have for a variety of reasons chosen not to do so. Nor do the BLS estimates include union members who are currently unemployed” (Sloane & Witney, 2010, p.5). Given this important information, the examination of these minicases will provide answers to the problems unions face in organizational settings.

The White-Collar Union Organizer Case:

The white-collar union organizer affiliates in the case consist of: an office worker and the Office Employee International Union organizer, Nancy Rogers (Sloane & Witney, 2010). Base on Sloane & Witney (2010), “white-collar workers have long felt superior to their blue-collar-worker counterparts and tended to believe that joining a union decreases their occupational prestige” (p.13). It is synonymous to the office worker’s explanation to Rogers on the company’s culture as management’s influence toward nonunion workers to reframe from joining unions has resulted in paying them greater salaries, impose the idea of unions are only for manual workers and inappropriate for white-collar people to join (Sloane & Witney, 2010).This case provided a reference t...

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...ovement, many restrictions imposed on both parties were necessary to help encourage constructive bargaining within the system.

To conclude this analysis on the basis of the labor’s extensive history, Sloane & Witney (2010) propose, “it is entirely possible that labor’s remarkable staying power has been because of the simple fact that to many workers, from the nineteenth century to the present, there really has been no acceptable substitute for collective bargaining as a means of maintaining and improving employment conditions” (p.80). In the end, it is important to anticipate unions and employers presently work together to find solutions that will enhance collective bargaining strategies and practices to serve the interest of both parties.

Works Cited

Sloane. A. A., Witney, F. (2010). LABOR RELATIONS (13th editions). Prentice Hall. Upper Saddle River, NJ