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Union democracy refers to the governance of trade unions, as well as the protection of the rights and interests of individual members. [1] Modern usage of the term has focused on the extent to which election procedures ensure that the executives of a union most accurately represent the interests of the members.
In 1911, a German sociologist, Robert Michels propounded a view that all democratic organisations were prone to become oligarchies because of the growth and size of modern organisations, the need for specialisation of officials, and the necessity that this division of labour would lead the rank and file to struggle to understand the activities of their leaders. Michels argued that this amounted to an iron law of oligarchy: all groups, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies with swollen bureaucracies.
Michels himself, after falling out with the German Social Democrat Party, migrated to Italy and joined Mussolini's Fascist Party. Nevertheless, his ideas were popularized after the Second World War in particular by Seymour Martin Lipset, Trow, and James Samuel Coleman in a book entitled, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1957). This book argued that the ITU was an exception to Michels' general law, and that the conditions necessary to ensure democracy were that an opposition to the union's leadership could form. This depended on ensuring the leadership did not monopolize the channels of communication with members.
Lipset and his coauthors confined their understanding of "democracy" to the existence of organised opposition. They were skeptical that the conditions in the ITU, which made it democratic, were likely to arise in many other unions spontaneously.
Following this, in 1959, the US federal government passed the Landrum-Griffin Act 1959 to mandate democratic principles be followed in union governance.
Principles include:
While there are some superficial similarities to the so-called organizing model of union activity, advocates of union democracy are swift to point out that many of the alleged exemplars of the organizing model do not, in their internal structure, meet the requirements listed above.
The politics of Malta takes place within a framework of a parliamentary representative democratic republic, whereby the president of Malta is the constitutional head of state. Executive authority is vested in the president of Malta, with the general direction and control of the Government of Malta remaining with the prime minister of Malta, who is the head of government and the cabinet. Legislative power is vested in the Parliament of Malta, which consists of the president of Malta and the unicameral House of Representatives of Malta with the speaker as the presiding officer of the legislative body. Judicial power remains with the chief justice and the judiciary of Malta. Since independence, the party electoral system has been dominated by the Christian democratic Nationalist Party and the social democratic Labour Party.
The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, is a US labor law that regulates labor unions' internal affairs and their officials' relationships with employers.
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.
Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy is a book by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels, published in 1911 and first introducing the concept of iron law of oligarchy. It is considered one of the classics of social sciences, in particular sociology and political science.
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The International Typographical Union (ITU) was a North American trade union for the printing trade for newspapers and other media. It was founded on May 3, 1852, in the United States as the National Typographical Union, and changed its name to the International Typographical Union at its Albany, New York, convention in 1869 after it began organizing members in Canada. The ITU was one of the first unions to admit female members, admitting women members such as Augusta Lewis, Mary Moore and Eva Howard in 1869.
Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union is a book by Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow and James S. Coleman, originally published by New York Free Press in 1956.
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