1) "A corporate-sponsored cultural revolution established the concept of markets in American culture as a means of justifying corporate power (Doukas 2003). The concept of the market is symbolic and plays a ritual role in supporting prevailing practices and justifies authoritarian methods of labour control in global systems (Collins 2002, Griffith 1987), and it, therefore, has a direct bearing on unions ‘effectiveness".
2) "American unions have two dimensions: organizing and servicing. Organizing is the use of personnel and resources to increase the strength of the union by organizing more work sites and workers to control a greater portion of the labour market in an area or industry. Organizing can extend to electoral and legislative politics when unions mobilize support for candidates or causes. Servicing is negotiating and enforcing contracts that state the terms and conditions of union members’ work. It entails policing of contracts to be sure that employers are in compliance and processing grievances to resolve alleged contract violations".
3) In 1995 a four-year study that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) commissioned concluded that members prefer resources to go toward getting them better contracts, wages, benefits, and job protection. Leaders want to implement an organizing model to organize unorganized workers and to elect labour-friendly politicians. The two models of union behaviour are at odds because each requires different uses of the same scarce resources such as money for salaries (Durrenberger & Erem 2005a, Wells 1996)".
4) Worker disinterest, individualism, or some inscrutable difference between the United States and European countries do not account for this decline. Rather, it is due to well organized, massive, and often violent opposition (Durrenberger 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996; Johnston 1994; Vanneman & Cannon 1987). Other factors in labour’s decline are structural, such as the flight of capital to low-wage countries and areas of the United States in which unions are weak, the shift from an industrial to a service economy, and the changes of law and administration that have moved unions toward being bureaucracies for handling quasi-legal cases (Durrenberger & Erem1997; 2005a). Union leadership gained the stability of the servicing model at the price of organizing power, but because that guaranteed and enhanced their positions of power, and a predictable if the closed community of power, they were willingly complicit".
