1. Movement for Black Lives at Work? Racial Justice Spillover, Labor Organization, and New Worker Militancy.
- Author
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Isaac, Larry W. and Rose, Brittney
- Subjects
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BLACK Lives Matter movement , *SOCIAL justice , *SOCIOLOGICAL research , *LABOR movement , *SOCIAL movements , *LABOR unions - Abstract
Emerging from a confluence of events – including Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) – racial consciousness has intensified in recent years. In the wake of a long declining labor movement, there has also been a surprising upsurge in labor militancy. Are these two currents systematically related? Situating our analysis in the sociological literature on social movement spillover, we ask if there is evidence of racial justice spillover into and stimulating workplace militancy. Employing all known strikes and worker protests during 2021 and 2022, we find: (a) racial justice demands did, indeed, appear as part of workplace militancy during this period; (b) racial justice demands were voiced in both worker protests and strikes launched most heavily by unions but also by alt-labor/SMOs and by unorganized workers; (c) weekly time-series regression models indicate that BLM demonstrations stimulated the frequency of workplace protests and strikes with racial justice demands which, in turn, stimulated wider worker militancy over other issues; and (d) interdependency analysis of worker actions reveals that unionized worker protests served as a key catalyst driving other forms of worker militancy with racial justice demands. We discuss the implications of our findings for social movement spillover theory and for moving racial justice and labor movements forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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