Local Independent Unions and the American Labor Movement

Local independent unions have received relatively little attention from students of the American labor movement, at least since the constitutional validation of the Wagner Act in 1937. In fact, local independent unions are usually dismissed as negligible in size or significance for collective bargaining, largely on the unexamined premise that such labor organizations can exist and function only with the covert assistance of certain employers. Yet, according to estimates developed in this article, upwards of 1.5 millions of workers may he represented in collective bargaining by this type of labor organization. This article challenges the view that local independent unions are viable only because of employer encouragement and assistance, estimates their size and rate of growth, describes and analyzes the factors accounting for their industrial and geographic distributions, and discusses their relationship to the main corpus of the American labor movement. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)