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Most American workers have little possibility of joining a union, despite indications of growing interest. As union membership has become less available, unions and activists have begun to explore other forms of participation beyond the collective bargaining relationship that currently structures US labor relations. This paper examines two emergent models: associational unionism and workers advocacy organizations and considers their websites as a source of insight into the conceptions of structure and purpose that currently guide organizations and their leaders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer society has long been associated with a dichotomous linking of women to consumption and men to production, with little attention given, until recently, to the history and significance of masculine consumption practices. This paper identifies the history of Freemasonry, a centuries-old, male-only fraternal society, as a privileged site for such analysis. Eighteenth-century Masonic lodges contributed to an expanding market for consumer goods, while late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry replicated that era?s taste for lavish spectacle and consumption. This turn toward the theatrical was vigorously contested by Masonic traditionalists who saw it as a perniciously feminized innovation and argued that commodification was inconsistent with honorable manhood. In contrast, I argue that Freemasonry was, throughout its history, an institution that used commodity consumption to articulate varying conceptions of masculine identity. Moreover, its history suggests that leisure and consumption for men have often been framed as acts of collective masculine affirmation, a framing that obscured its commodified character, and thus its association with the feminine, while working to promote men?s material entitlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Welfare Rights Organization of the late 1960s and early 1970s was the site of an internal battle over the character of the movement. What was the collective identity of those who were, or should be, mobilized, and what cultural-political strategy should be used? The debates and contestation revolved around issues of gender, race, and class, with some seeking to foreground these issues and others to elide them in an organization whose members were predominantly black women, but whose staff was composed largely of white men. Should the racial-gender identity of those targeted be central to self-understanding and political strategy, or should the movement attempt to create a multi-issue organization that would mobilize men as well as women, wage-earners as well as welfare recipients? Should the movement organize around a politics of economic justice that cut across race and gender lines but, in doing so, threaten to marginalize needs particular to low-income mothers? The members (as opposed to the staff) of NWRO wanted to foreground issues of race, gender, and motherhood; ACORN was formed as the direct product of a considered rejection of the welfare rights strategy, a rejection of what was viewed as the NWRO's overly narrow and politically vulnerable constituency of predominantly black welfare mothers. ACORN defined itself as a multi-issue, multi-racial movement of low and middle income men and women. The alternatives posed by these two organizations have implications for how we today think about welfare and welfare reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]