I am working on a paper that will explores the concept of "complimentary labor movement organizations" -- that is, organizations that are not unions, but which share the larger objectives that define the labor movement qua social movement and, for this reason, can help to strengthen the movement as a whole and the position of unions in this context. This category includes workers' centers, the anti-sweatshop movement, ACORN, and the AFL-CIO's Working America. The paper will also consider the conditions under which it makes sense for national labor federations and affiliated unions to provide financial and other forms of support such organizations. This work is part of my ongoing collaboration with the research consortium organized by the Centre de Recherche Inter-Universitaire sur la Mondialisation et le Travail (CRIMT), based at the University of Montreal and funded by Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

In addition to this conceptual piece, I am working on questions pertaining to two specific non-union components of the broader labor movement: anti-sweatshop organizations and workers' centers. As regards the anti-sweatshop movement, my colleagues and I have published two essays (listed above) documenting the level of consumer willingness to pay more for clothing warranted to be sweat-free in a department store experiment. We recently completed a third paper that documents very similar consumer purchasing behavior in an American Apparel store that claims that all of its products are sweat-free, and are looking for a place to publish it. Together, the evidence discussed in these papers suggests that the failure to provide many sweat-free alternatives to the global sweatshop norm in this industry constitutes a massive market failure. It is important to explain why this failure persists -- that is, why none of the major brand and none of the major retailers has so far responded to this unmet demand with genuinely sweat-free production (as distinct from implausible claims to be trying to do so) -- and a future paper will be devoted to this question.. We will also write a paper that applies sociological approaches to a question that the literature has so far failed to answer convincingly: what distinguishes those who are ethical consumers from those who are not.

As regards workers' centers, Alice Gates and I have worked with the Washtenaw County Workers' Center to collect and analyze survey data documenting conditions of low-wage service work in Washtenaw County, with particular focus on the restaurant sector. Our report, while really only a working paper, is listed in my publications above. More work on the restaurant sector will be forthcoming. I may also do an investigation of the home cleaning sector as well. In both contexts, I will try to use the detailed picture of local labor markets that we are able to paint to explore the question of the effects of undocumented immigrant workers on wages and the job prospects of native-born workers -- a hot-button political issue on which the micro-level empirical evidence required to really understand what is going on is suprisingly sparse. Our initial report has already had something to say about this, but in a near-full-employment situation. It will be important to revisit the question in the new context of economic recession and high unemployment.

I am also working on two aspects of the union component of labor movements: the role of central federations in promoting revitalizing movement innovation, and the role of faculty unions in fighting the spread of contingent labor in higher education. My research on labor federations will be conducted in collaboration with CRIMT colleagues from the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. My piece of this larger project will focus on the United States. We will document what national labor federations and their subnational components (e.g. state AFL-CIO and central labor councils) have done to promote union renewal in each country, and try to explain why these efforts have been more or less ambitious and more or less successful. We hope that we will be able to expand the comparison in a second round beyond these "most similar cases" to encompass other rich capital polyarchies in which labor movements and central federations are configured in very different ways (e.g., France, Germany, Italy and Sweden).

Regarding higher education faculty unions in the United States and Canada , I will be building on the work that I co-published with David Dobbie. Our next step is to assess the likely effects of different strategies that faculty unions and organizations such as the AAUP are advocating in response to the challenges posed by the growing share of faculty who are employed as contingent labor. There are two broad strategic approaches: legislative and collective bargaining. The legislative strand includes ideas such as legislatively mandated caps on the share of nontenure faculty that public institutions may employ, and/or the allocation of government money for the specific purpose of rising the salaries of nontenure-track faculty and reducing the gap with tenure track faculty, and/or paying for the promotion of qualified nontenure-track faculty into the tenure ranks. Collective bargaining focused efforts begin with organizing all nontenure-track faculty into bargaining units that are part of -- or cooperate with -- those in which tenure-track faculty are found. Collective bargaining is then used to reduce the wage gaps between tenured and nontenured, and between full-time and part-time, to create viable bridges from the nontenure to the tenure track. The central questions are whether either of these approaches have yielded much success to date, and if not, why not.

It is also time to update my work on the evolution of North American economic integration and its implications for labor movement and labor market dynamics. We are now at a particularly important juncture in that evolution. Neoliberal economic ideology, and associated practices of anti-labor regulation and financial market deregulation, have led us into a profound economic crisis. In the short run, the economic disaster further weakens unions, forcing them to focus on damage control. But in the longer run, the neoliberal implosion has undercut the hegemony of the neoliberal vision, creating the space for rethinking global and continental economic intergration and the role of organized labor in economic development. To a lesser but still significant degree, the crisis has also altered the balance of political power, somewhat increasing our capacity to shift policies and institutions in a direction more compatible with workers' interests, democratic principles, and ecosystem sustainability.

One piece of this re-building will be re-writing the labor and environmental side-accords to NAFTA, whether the new provisions are inserted into a renegotiated NAFTA, or remain in "side deals." I will be working with colleagues to identify the most important ways in which in which worker rights have been suppressed in each NAFTA country, and the kinds of changes to the side deal's provisions required to make it an effective tool against employer and state repression of these rights. Beyond the labor component of the new system lie the larger questions of to reconcile ecological sustainability and human development imperatives, what kinds of supra-national continental institutions will be required (beyond NAFTA and its side-deals), and how the continental economy should be inserted into the global economy. I hope to contribute to these larger discussions as well.

On the very different terrain of pedagogy, I have begun a new research project on the impacts of University of Michigan undergraduate participation in community service learning (CSL) courses on attitudes, beliefs and activities after graduation. Preliminary findings suggest that the impacts are substantial. There is a lot of published research on learning outcomes of CSL within the period during which the course is taught (i.e., entry and exit interviews and/or surveys). However, there is very little work -- and most of that anecdotal -- on the longer term impacts of such educational experiences. This research will contribute to filling that gap.