The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Organization, Ideology, and Emotion

Labor studies scholars and union organizers agree that rank-and-file union drives are effective, even against union busters, anti-union consultants, and intransigent employers. This paper synthesizes organizers' analyses of such campaigns in Los Angeles to explain why rank-and-file union drives work. We suggest that anti-union campaigns create fairly standard and locally hegemonic anti-union workplace cultures. We examine struggles between management and unions around workplace social relations and control of space as a Gramscian war of position in which both sides seek to make their ideology and its emotional scaffolding workers' common sense. Our explanation for what successful rank-and-file strategies do also reveals some current limitations.