Comprehensive campaign

A comprehensive campaign is labor union organizing or a collective bargaining campaign with a heavy focus on research, the use of community coalition-building, publicity and public pressure, political and regulatory pressure, and economic and legal pressure in addition to traditional organizing tactics.

The comprehensive campaign is a labor tactic primarily used in the United States, where labor unions lack many of the legal protections accorded their counterparts in the European Community and where cultural norms against unions are not as strong. However, as globalization increases and capital and labor become more mobile, employers outside the U.S. are adopting American union-avoidance tactics, and comprehensive campaigns are becoming more common in Europe and Asia.

Comprehensive campaigns are not commonly used in the United States due to their cost and the organizational expertise their require. However, they are gaining popularity in the U.S. labor movement, and many unions claim to be building comprehensive campaign capabilities.

The comprehensive campaign is an evolution of labor union tactics, a process which has been ongoing in the United States since the 1960s. The identification of "good organizing practices," which arose out of a wave of labor union organizing in the 1930s and 1940s, was no longer proving effective for a variety of reasons (innovations in union-avoidance and anti-union tactics, economic and cultural changes, statutory and case law alterations in federal labor protections, etc.).

Innovations in grass-roots community organizing, developed outside the labor movement in the 1960s, offered American unions a new way with which to exercise power vis-a-vis employers. In 1971, radical activist Saul Alinsky published Rules for Radicals, a book which outlined the new strategy of the "community campaign." Activists believed that suburbanization, the rise of multinational corporations, economic dislocation and the alienating effects of modern life had eroded communal norms against corporate greed and misbehavior. By rebuilding a sense of community by uniting existing organizations into new coalitions, or creating new organizations and then educating the coalition members about various causes, these activists believed they could alter the balance of power in their communities. The concept of the community campaign was quickly transferred to the labor movement.

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