The past two decades have witnessed marked decline in union membership, intense pressure in collective bargaining, and loss of political influence and public support for unions in the U.S. and around the world. Many of the academic and popular discussions of “what unions should do” in response to this decline assert that unions must adopt a single set of strategies to survive.  David Weil, in his book Turning the Tide: Strategic Planning for Labor Unions, eschews blanket remedies.  Instead, he provides tools for evaluating the environmental factors faced by labor unions, designing new strategies to respond to those factors, and then implementing those strategies by restructuring unions to adapt to new conditions. 

Turning the Tide remains the only text specifically focused on applying ideas and tools of strategic planning and management to the challenges facing labor unions.  It provides labor leaders, staff, activists, and those interested in labor unions with detailed approaches to assessing the external factors that affect union leverage and strength. At the same time, it provides a framework for analyzing how a union’s internal organizational structure—from the people it hires to how it allocates its resources—affect its ability to achieve key objectives.  These ideas are illustrated throughout with a wide set of cases and examples. 

Ever since initial publication in 1994, Weil’s unique approach to dealing with the dramatic challenges facing the labor movement has led labor leaders and educators around the world to draw on Turning the Tide as a basic reference for designing and implementing strategies.

David Weil is Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University School of Management, a core faculty member in the Harvard Trade Union Program / Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Labor College.  In addition to being a leading scholar on labor union strategy, Weil serves as an advisor to labor unions and labor / management initiatives in the U.S. and many other countries.  Weil has published widely on strategic choices for labor unions as well as on labor market regulation and the impact of changes in industry structure on workplace policies.  He received his Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, and his Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Public Policy from Harvard University.