New York’s State Attorney has opened an investigation into whether ExxonMobil lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change and funded outside groups to question climate science, even as the company’s own expert researchers found that fossil fuel emissions do, indeed, contribute to rising temperatures.

The Exxon investigation reflects the broader politicization of climate change and the role of corporations in shaping public perceptions. Surveys have found that the U.S. public is poorly informed about the science of climate change. A climate change countermovement flush with funds from business and conservative organizations works to create skepticism and distort public understanding. These efforts mirror other controversies over science and risk, and past corporate campaigns to create doubt about the harmful impacts of chemicals such as tobacco, DDT, or holes in the ozone layer.

• Robert J. Brulle. 2014. “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations.” Climatic Change 122(4):681–94.
• Thomas Dietz, Paul C. Stern, and Robert W. Rycroft. 1989. “Definitions of Conflict and the Legitimation of Resources: The Case of Environmental Risk.” Sociological Forum 4(1):47–70.
• Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques. 2013. “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection.” American Behavioral Scientist 57(6):699–731.
• Valerie J. Gunter. 2005. “News Media and Technological Risks: The Case of Pesticides after ‘Silent Spring.’” The Sociological Quarterly 46(4):671–98.
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Climate change denial is not simply the result of well funded public relations campaigns, however. It also reflects collective and individual anxieties and the difficulties of coming to terms with abstract and long-term risks. Everyday experiences, cultural norms, political beliefs, and religion shape how people come to terms with problems like climate change.

• John H. Evans and Justin Feng. 2013. “Conservative Protestantism and Skepticism of Scientists Studying Climate Change.” Climatic Change 121(4):595–608.
• Kari Marie Norgaard. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press.
• Min Zhou. 2015. “Public Environmental Skepticism: A Cross-National and Multilevel Analysis.” International Sociology 30(1):61–85.

For more on echo chambers and how climate change denial narratives gain credibility, check out this new piece over at Contexts!

In addition to current labor activism, movements for economic justice have also emerged from students, retirees, consumers, and other communities outside traditional unions and leftist political parties. Today’s mass movements range from the Indignados movement in Spain to Occupy in the U.S. to anti-austerity protests in Greece to massive student demonstrations in Chile. Protestors are contesting the inevitability of privatization, cuts to public spending, and rising inequality, among other issues worldwide.

• Wolfgang Rudig and Georgios Karyotis. 2013. “Beyond The Usual Suspects? New Participants In Anti-Austerity Protests In Greece.” Mobilization: An International Journal 18(3):313–30.
• Ruth Milkman, Penny Lewis, and Stephanie Luce. 2013. “The Genie’s out of the Bottle: Insiders’ Perspectives on Occupy Wall Street.” The Sociological Quarterly 54(2):194–98.
• Cesar Guzman-Concha. 2012. “The Students’ Rebellion in Chile: Occupy Protest or Classic Social Movement?” Social Movement Studies 11(3-4):408–15.
• Ernesto Castañeda. 2012. “The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street.” Social Movement Studies 11(3-4):309–19.

Read Part I (The U.S. & Inequality) and Part II (Global Labor).

Free trade globalization has had largely negative impacts on workers by driving down wages and allowing capital to move when workers organize and demand better pay and working conditions. Free trade agreements like NAFTA have also destroyed local industries and hurt farmers in the global South who cannot compete with cheap products from the U.S.

Global trade also creates new possibilities for the workers of the world to unite. Transnational organizing campaigns targeted at multinational companies and global union federations have made concrete gains, helping workers improve working conditions and build working-class power.

• Tamara Kay. 2005. “Labor Transnationalism and Global Governance: The Impact of NAFTA on Transnational Labor Relationships in North America.” American Journal of Sociology 111(3):715–56.
• Jamie K. McCallum. 2013. Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing. Cornell University Press.
• Gay W. Seidman. 2007. Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism. Russell Sage Foundation.
• Jill Louise Esbenshade. 2009. Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry. Temple University Press.

Even in sweatshops and among immigrants in precarious jobs, workers are finding new ways of organizing. Workers in the global South are protesting and unionizing in factories that make consumer goods, despite state repression and the power of multi-national corporations. Migrant workers in the informal sectors of the U.S. are getting around the barriers of labor law to organize outside traditional unions.

• Janice Ruth Fine. 2006. Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream. Cornell University Press.
• Ching Kwan Lee. 2007. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University of California Press.
• Biju Mathew. 2005. Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City. Cornell University Press.
• Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott. 2014. New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement. Cornell University Press.

Read May Day Part I: The U.S. and Inequality

Workers of the World, Unite!

Since the late 1800s May Day—the first of May and a traditional European spring celebration—has been recognized as International Workers Day. It’s a time to celebrate working people and the possibilities for international solidarity. On May Day 2015, the state of workers looks rather grim: expanding inequality, increasing fiscal austerity, and degrading working conditions. Amid these negative trends, though, there are glimmers of hope as global workers organize and mobilize to assert their rights, curtail corporate power, and create a more equitable world.

To mark May Day, we are exploring issues of inequality, labor, and social movements in a three-part series.

Part I: The U.S. & Inequality

Deregulation, privatization, and declining unionization have exacerbated the gulf between rich and poor in the past 50 years. Researchers have documented how much of the increase in wage inequality is due to the weakening of policies and institutions that have historically protected and empowered workers—unions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and labor law—in addition to structural changes in the economy and labor market.

• ChangHwan Kim and Arthur Sakamoto. 2010. “Assessing the Consequences of Declining Unionization and Public-Sector Employment: A Density-Function Decomposition of Rising Inequality From 1983 to 2005.” Work and Occupations 37(2):119–61.
• Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld. 2011. “Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality.” American Sociological Review 76(4):513–37.
• Winfried Koeniger, Marco Leonardi, and Luca Nunzjata. 2007. “Labor Market Institutions And Wage Inequality.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 60(3):340–56.

Read May Day Part II: Global Labor. There’s Research on That!

Read May Day Part III: Social & Political Movements. There’s Research on That!

American companies have a new trick for an old trend of saving money by going overseas – moving their headquarters to countries with lower taxes.  These recent corporate inversions in which U.S. based companies, such as Medtronic and Burger King, reincorporate abroad in order to avoid taxes is part of an ongoing process in which corporations go global to offshore work and shuffle money through “tax havens” to boost profits. Commentators such as Allen Sloan condemn these tactics as unpatriotic and bad corporate citizenship. This highlights the tension between national interests and the pressures of globalization. We know that firms are not tied to particular national borders—a fundamental aspect of capitalism that classic theorists like Max Weber and Karl Marx observed in the 19^th and early 20^th century— but why are these publicly unpopular actions so prevalent today?

While nation-states have lost some power in the past 30 years, they created the very policies that contributed to economic globalization. U.S. policy since the 1970s has led to an increased financialization of the economy and the opening of global capital flows. Corporations aren’t just moving overseas due to greedy and unpatriotic CEOs, but the result of decades of change in policy and the global economy. 

• Saskia Sassen. 1996. Losing Control?: Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Greta Krippner. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Firms also have immediate financial interests in increasing shareholder value and avoiding taxes, even if that means harming national interests or engaging in immoral behaviors. Organizational dynamics, leadership and culture shape business strategies as well as the broader policy and economic context. 

• Frank Dobbin and Dirk Zorn. 2005. “Corporate Malfeasance and the Myth of Shareholder Value.” Political Power and Social Theory 17:179-198
• Harland Prechel and Theresa Morris. “The Effects of Organizational and Political Embeddedness on Financial Malfeasance in the Largest U.S. Corporations: Dependence, Incentives, and Opportunities.” American Sociological Review, June 2010; vol. 75: pp. 331-354
• Neil Fligstein and Peter Brantley. 1992. “Bank Control, Owner Control, or Organizational Dynamics: Who Controls the Large Modern Corporation?” American Journal of Sociology 98(2): 280-307
• Nikos Passas. 2005. “Lawful but Awful: ‘Legal Corporate Crimes’.” The Journal of Socio-Economics 34(6):771-786

The Rockefellers, powerful American industrialists with vast wealth built from the oil industry, are now ditching fossil fuels. According to an announcement from the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund, the organization has pledged to withdraw their investments from fossil fuels and instead invest in clean energy. Corporations and institutions respond to pressure when social norms shift and change, especially when it impacts their public image and the bottom line.

Corporations can be pressured to enact socially responsible behaviors through government policy, nonprofits, civil society groups, social movements, and internal culture and leadership.

• Hayagreeva Rao, Calvin Morrill, and Mayer N. Zald. 2000. “Power plays: how social movements and collective action create new organizational forms” Research in Organizational Behavior 22:237–81.
• Rachel Schurman, William Munro. 2009. “Targeting capital: A cultural economy approach to understanding the efficacy of two antigenetic engineering movements.” American Journal of Sociology. 115:155–202
• Wesley D. Sine and Brandon H. Lee. 2009. “Tilting at Windmills? The Environmental Movement and the Emergence of the U.S. Wind Energy Sector.” Administrative Science Quarterly 54(1):123–55.
• John L. Campbell. 2007. “Why Would Corporations Behave in Socially Responsible Ways? An Institutional Theory of Corporate Social Responsibility.” Academy of Management Review 32(3):946–67.

Yet, this announcement may also represent a corporate public relations and greenwashing campaign that fails to address the underlying causes of climate change. Either way, the direct impact on energy industries may be less important than the symbolic impact of the gesture.

• Bobby Subhabrata  Banerjee. 2008. “Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Critical Sociology 34(1):51–79.
• Eric Krieg. 2008. “The Greenwashing of America.” Contexts 7(2):58–59.
• John Roberts. 2003. “The Manufacture of Corporate Social Responsibility: Constructing Corporate Sensibility.” Organization 10(2):249–65.
• David L  Levy. 1997. “Environmental Management as Political Sustainability.” Organization & Environment 10(2):126–47.
• Frances Bowen. (2014). After Greenwashing: Symbolic corporate environmentalism and society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is the iconic dead-end job of the U.S. service economy with low-wages, few benefits and certainly no labor unions. But now a national movement of fast-food and other low-paid workers is growing and organizing to improve working conditions. In the past two years there have been seven national fast-food strikes, which reflect a broader resurgence in the U.S. labor movement and new forms of social mobilization from Occupy Wall Street to the Walmart Black Friday strikes. These recent protests have mobilized often marginalized communities in ways that question the service economy model based on cheap non-unionized labor.

Service work, and fast-food in particular, is a growing sector of employment that is indicative of larger trends in the U.S. economy towards contingent, temporary employment and low wages. Violations of workplace laws like mandatory overtime and minimum wage are part of corporate cost-cutting and common in low-wage industries, and unionization could help give workers power to resist these practices.

• Annette Bernhardt, Michael W. Spiller, and Diana Polson. 2013. “All Work and No Pay: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.” Social Forces 91(3):725–46.

This revitalized labor movement is also mobilizing women, people of color and immigrants who were largely left out of the traditional craft and industrial unions.

• Ruth Milkman. 2006. L.A. Story : Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Broader decline of unionization and decrease in the minimum wage has contributed to rising income inequality, and so attempts to organize low-wage workers could help all U.S. workers and reduce this inequality. Union membership provides a wage boost for workers, especially women, people of color and those with less education.

• Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld. 2011. “Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality.” American Sociological Review 76(4):513–37.
• Jake Rosenfeld and Meredith Kleykamp. 2012. “Organized Labor and Racial Wage Inequality in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 117(5):1460–1502.

For more on the inclusive power of unions, check out this Girl w/Pen! post.