Description
Book SynopsisIn With God on Our Side, Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California.
Trade ReviewReich chronicles the successful drive for recognition of a healthcare workers union at a Catholic hospital in this articulate and conceptually interesting sociological account... a case study that holds implications for the wider context of unionization today. As private sector unionization enters its fifth decade of decline, the us-versus-them frame that guided pro-union efforts in the past must give way, the author argues, to greater attention to the meaning of vocation and worker solidarity, especially for employees in public services and those with vocational moral commitments like health care.
* Choice *
Reich uses his experience as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union to explain how a Catholic hospital administration at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital reacted to unionizers employing a Catholic strategy. The book suggests some of the new opportunities and challenges presented by unionizers confronting an employer with a strong moral and cultural identity.
* Conscience *
Reich's central thesis is that unions and workers will increase their workplace voice and power if they add a strong ideological and emotional component to their time-honored strategies of exerting economic and political leverage and of forging strong community alliances. This is a timely and compelling affirmation. It gives Reich’s work a pathfinding quality which makes the book an invaluable resource for workers, labor leaders and activists, labor students and scholars, and anyone attempting to improve labor-management relationships.
* American Catholic Studies *
This is an engaging book written by a former doctoral student and one-time volunteer organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).... With God on Our Side makes a significant contribution to labour history and labour studies by reminding us of the cultural dimensions of labour struggles.
* Labour/Le Travail *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Work's Meaning and Labor's Power
1. The Labor of Love: Vocational Commitments in the Hospital
2. Losing It: The Limits of Economic Interests and Political Power
3. A Struggle over New Things: Contesting Catholic Teaching
4. Winning the Heart Way: Organizing and Cultural Struggle
5. Trouble in the House of Labor: Alternative Visions of New Unionism
Conclusion: What Should Unions Do?
