Contenu du sommaire : Les conservateurs et le travail

Wal-Mart, John Tate, and Their Anti-Union America
Hostility to trade unionism infused the corporate culture of Wal-Mart, whose revolutionary transformation of the retail industry in the United States made it, for a time, the nation's largest and one of its most dynamic companies. A product of the rural South, Wal-Mart required an ideologically sophisticated strategy to stymie union organizing when it began to put its stores in metropolitan America. Employment lawyer John Tate proved his worth in this regard. The anti- union strategist's ideas had been shaped by his clients, some of the most intransigent anti-union employers of the textile South and the small town Midwest. In the early 1970s Tate codified for Wal-Mart and other service sector firms the key elements of a successful union avoidance strategy: construct a business ethos that mimics the sense of community found in monoracial, small-town America; deploy a pension scheme that rewards loyalty for a core of longtime employees; and use the “free speech” rights of employers to pain unions as corrupt and self-serving institutions incapable of improving the wages or work life of employees. He proved successful: there are no unions at any of the 5000 plus Wal-Mart stores in the United States and Canada.

Voice! The debate on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and the conservative fight for democracy in the workplace. This article is a first step toward a more thorough history of the weakening of trade-unions in the U.S. Based both on the history of representations and political history, it first analyzes debates on the Employee Free Choice Act in 2008-09. Since the 1950s, conservatives have fought against the double legacy of the New Deal – democracy of the workplace and union freedoms – and have promoted another view of democracy at work. For businessmen, as well as conservative lawyers and economists, each employee should have a free access to jobs and working conditions should be the result of an individual bargaining without trade-union pressures. This ideological fight hides a fundamental political stake: the funding of elections.

From New York to Madison. Workfare in the Public Sector
This article deals with workfare reforms in the 1990s and the way they impact the current debate on public workers in the United States. It focuses on New York and shows the consequences of a combination of factors: the specific institutional development of trade-unions in NY, the way local associations gave up on welfare and finally the streamlining of public services all jointly led to a deteriorating of working conditions in the public sector. These factors also paved the way for a weakening of the rights and status of public agents as illustrated also in Wisconsin.

Teach for America... And against Trade-Unions
Teach for America (TFA) was created in 1990 by a young Princeton Graduate. It seeks to recruit and train graduates from the best universities in the country and send them as teachers in the most impoverished urban areas. Through a sociological analysis of TFA, this article shows how this “civic” program challenges the power of teachers' unions.

The Living Wage Movement. A Progressive Movement in an Era of Conservative Ascendency
The movement for a living wage emerged in Baltimore in 1996 and soon spread around the country to popularize the demand for a basic wage that took into account the real standard of living in a given community. The main characteristics of the movement were its local and grassroots nature and its ability to bring together different progressive forces, such as left-wing unions, community associations such as ACORN, and progressive religious forces. As the movement reached its goals in most communities it became the target of a violent campaign by extreme right-wing conservative forces determined to destroy any progressive movement in the country.

A Struggle Behind the Scenes. The Confrontation Between the Bush Administration and the Shamir Government (1991-1992)In the early 1990s the G. Bush administration and the nationalist Israeli government headed by Itzhak Shamir traded barbs on the issue of colonies in the occupied territories, which the U.S. diplomacy regarded as an obstacle to peace negotiations. In this article, the author explains how far the confrontation went, as well as the limits of what an administration intent on promoting the American interest even at the expense of a confrontation with Israel could actually achieve. This crisis is relevant to understand the current behavior of the Obama administration towards the Benyamin Netanyahu coalition.