Rethinking Unionism in a Changing World of Work, Family and Community Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the state of unionism today and argues that in strategizing for more workers’ power and effective worker representation, unions have – unsurprisingly – focussed upon the primary domain that workers occupy: the labour market and workplaces, applying a particular repertoire of tools. While social conditions beyond the terrain of work have always mattered and sometimes been recognized by activists and theorists, these are often under-attended in analysis and strategy. The article argues that the relevant social context includes the three “microsystems” of work, household and community life, their intersecting “mesosystems” and the larger “macrosystem” of labour law, social norms and gender cultures within which they are located. Together these construct a system which affects the ways in which unions can build power, the tools available to them, and the industrial issues that matter to workers. Significant changes in the three interacting domains of work, household and community life since the mid-1970s in many industrialized countries have changed the system within which workers’ create collective power. This is illustrated by evidence drawn from the Australian experience, and the changing forms and occupational structure of employment, and the changing shape of households and communities within which Australian workers live. Workers’ increasing mobility and work, family and community transitions make some of the traditional vehicles of union power outmoded – like collectivizing through a longstanding job or craft affiliation. Such changes call for new forms of collectivization and create new priorities for workers in their bargaining and industrial conditions. They also have implications for the tools – collective bargaining, substantive and procedural statutory rights or social security – that will most effectively improve workers’ circumstances.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".