Worker views his union

This is a study of the attitudes of union members. Six midwestern lo cals, of coal miners, plumbers, steel workers, metal workers, knitting mill employees, and telephone workers, were selected for study, and interviews held with samples of rank-and-file members as well as with the leadership group. Each local union was chosen so as to be different from the other situations yet representative of a broad segment of the American labor movement. We were concerned with the attitudes of workers toward the union and its leading activities as well as toward job and company; in each case we built our interview guides around the key problems with which each group of workers was faced, and we sought to interpret the results against the total social-economic back ground of the workers' jobs and lives. For the most part we did not study union performance, though in the course of our observations of the six locals we were alert to performance as well as to the attitudes of leaders and members. The six case studies are followed by five chap ters containing our observations about the union member in America suggested by our research material.

Our interest lay in types of reactions and patterns of experience rather than in statistical relationships, in qualitative rather than in quantitative analysis. Nevertheless, we sought to use care in the selec tion of samples, in the construction of interview guides, and in the analysis of interview data, to permit confidence in our results. The way in which we conducted the study is described in the Appendix.

The research project on which this volume reports was sponsored by the Industrial Relations Center of the University of Chicago. We wish to record our indebtedness to the many people, both at the university and elsewhere, who helped us with the study. We are particularly in debted to Frederick H. Harbison, formerly an executive officer of the Industrial Relations Center and now associated with the Industrial Re lations Section at Princeton,