ABSTRACT
After a long period of neglect, sociological interest in the labor movement has burgeoned in recent decades, despite the relentless decline of trade union density in nearly all the world's nations. The ubiquitous growth of class inequalities since the 1970s and the accompanying expansion of what has come to be called “the precariat” (Standing, 2011), along with a wave of innovative organizing efforts and the emergence of progressive union leadership in many countries in the 1980s and 1990s, helped to stimulate this unexpected renewal of labor movement sociology. “Not since the 1930s, when the ‘labor problem’ was omnipresent, has unionism commanded as much attention by sociologists,” an essay in the 1992 Annual Review of Sociology declared soon after this new literature began to develop (Kimeldorf and Stepan-Norris, 1992).
