Labor unions began creating new organizing strategies in the nineteen-eighties with the hope of increasing membership levels. This dissertation focuses on two such strategies: the "comprehensive campaign" utilized by the International Grocery Workers' Union (IGWU) and the "blitz" developed by the United States Clothing Workers' Union (USCWU). These strategies differ in one fundamental way; the amount of participation they elicit from the workforce being organized. I am interested in how different levels of participation influence workers' sentiments and actions regarding the union. The IGWU's "comprehensive campaign" is a top-down approach. Union officials collect unsavory information about the company in hopes of exchanging this information for union recognition. Workers' role in the campaign is reduced to signing union cards. The USCWU's "blitz" follows a grass-roots approach. With this strategy, union officials train workers to organize their fellow employees. An active worker contingency, then, helps to mobilize the workforce to vote union. Principles from participatory democracy suggest that when an authority structure incorporates participation, individuals feel more satisfied and committed to the organization. The act of participation also affects people behaviorally; participation teaches individuals how to be active. In order to analyze how the different campaign authority structures influenced workers, I interviewed two groups of employees; thirty of whom experienced the comprehensive campaign and twenty of whom participated in the blitz. Both organizing campaigns were successful and resulted in a union contract. I asked employees about their feelings towards the campaigns and their participation in the union after the campaigns ended. I found that workers from the "comprehensive campaign" perceived the union as a business and this conception of the union discouraged activism and left employees ultimately dissatisfied. Workers from the blitz, however, developed a "union as workers" framework. This framework motivated employees to be active after the organizing campaign and gave workers a sense of fulfillment. The findings from this study suggest that organizing strategies involve more than the ability of unions to increase the number of their rank-and-file. They are a crucial method in which workers learn to become active agents within the union.

The primary object is to make an exploration of and to examine in detail the practice of industrial espionage and surveillance. Many people, while they may be aware of the existence of such a practice, have only a limited knowledge of the ramifications inherent in it. This study, then, will seek to localize and to classify the facts on the subject of espionage and surveillance of the union activities of workers. An attempt will be made to present the facts in such a way that one who is completely unaware of the existence of the practice may also be made to know the significance of industrial espionage and surveillance by reading this paper.

The labor movement's groundswell in the 1990s accompanied a period of intense competition and conglomeration within the retail book sector. Unexpectedly, the intersection of these two trends produced two dozen union drives across the country between 1996 and 2004 at large retail bookstores, including Borders and Barnes & Noble. Historians have yet to fully examine these retail organizing contests or recount their contributions to the labor movement and its history, including booksellers' pioneering use of the internet as an organizing tool. This thesis focuses on the aspirations, tactics, and contributions of booksellers in their struggles to unionize their workplaces, while also exploring the economic context surrounding bookselling and the labor movement at the end of the twentieth century. While the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) auspiciously announced a national campaign in 1997 to organize thousands of bookstore clerks, the only successfully unionized bookstore from this era that remains today is the Powell's Books chain in Portland, Oregon with over 400 workers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 5. Local 5's successful union campaign at Powell's Books occurring between 1998 and 2000 is at the center of this study and stands out as a point of light against a dark backdrop of failed union attempts in the retail sector during the latter decades of the twentieth century. This inquiry utilizes Local 5's internal document archive and the collection of oral histories gathered by labor historians Edward Beechert and Harvey Schwartz in 2001 and 2002. My analysis of these previously unexamined records demonstrates how Powell's efforts to thwart the ILWU campaign proved a decisive failure and contributed to the polarization of a super majority of the workforce behind Local 5. Equally, my analysis illustrates how the self-organization, initiative, and unrelenting creativity of booksellers transformed a narrow union election victory to overwhelming support for the union's bargaining committee. Paramount to Local 5's contract success was the union's partnership with Portland's social justice community, which induced a social movement around Powell's Books at a time of increased political activity and unity among the nation's labor, environment, and anti-globalization activists. The bonds of solidarity and mutual aid between Local 5 and its community allies were forged during the World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and Portland's revival of May Day in 2000. Following eleven work stoppages and fifty-three bargaining sessions, the union acquired a first contract that far exceeded any gains made by the UFCW at its unionized bookstores. The Powell's agreement included improvements to existing health and retirement benefits plus an 18 percent wage increase for employees over three years. This analysis brings to light the formation of a distinct working-class culture and consciousness among Powell's booksellers, communicated through workers' essays, artwork, strikes, and solidarity actions with the social justice community. It provides a detailed account of Local 5's creative street theater tactics and work stoppages that captured the imagination of activists and the attention of the broader community. The conflict forced the news media and community leaders to publicly choose sides in a labor dispute reminiscent of struggles not seen in Portland since the 1950s. Observers of all political walks worried that the Portland cultural and commercial intuition would collapse under the weight of the two-year labor contest. My research illustrates the tension among the city's liberal and progressive populace created by the upstart union's presence at prominent liberal civic leader Michael Powell's iconic store and how the union organized prominent liberal leaders on the side of their cause. It concludes by recognizing that Local 5's complete history remains a work in progress, but that its formation represents an indispensable Portland contribution to the revitalized national labor movement of the late 1990s.