Paul F. Clark believes union leaders should take advantage of the valuable discoveries made in behavioral science to make their organizations more effective and, in Building More Effective Unions, he offers an accessible and straightforward account of how they can do so. The second edition provides an updated discussion of important lessons behavioral science holds for labor organizations. It also provides new examples of how unions and their leaders have benefited from putting the principles outlined in the first edition into practice.

The Great Recession that began in 2007 was marked by high rates of unemployment, the near collapse of the banking sector, and the bankruptcy of a host of venerable firms. The economy has only slowly recovered over the intervening years. Throughout this time, the labor movement has faced numerous challenges#8212;among them declining union membership, lackluster organizing performance, and difficulties at the bargaining table. Collective bargaining came under especially severe pressure in both private and public sectors. Employers were now more aggressive than in the 1980s, and unions were...

More than any other labor victory of the 1930s, the emergence of the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee symbolized the rise of organized labor to a position of power in the United States. Yet, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the unionization of the steel industry, and most notably the role of SWOC and Philip Murray in that process, has received far less attention than it deserves.

Beginning with a discussion of why the unionization of steel has been relatively neglected by labor historians, the contributors to this volume analyze early organizing efforts in steel,...