Adrienne Eaton

Trade Union Organizing in the Informal Economy: A Review of the Literature on Organizing in Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America and Western, Central and Eastern Europe - The purpose of this report is to review the existing literature on efforts throughout the globe by workers who labor outside the formal labor and employment relations policy framework of their country to form or join trade unions as well as unions’ efforts to organize and represent them.

Healing Together: The Labor-Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente, co-authored with Tom Kochan, Bob McKersie (both from MIT) and Paul Adler (USC). The book is based on years of research with Kaiser and its unions. As John Paul McDuffie’s blurb on the back of the book says, “Healing Together’s clear-eyed view of the ever-present perils and potential payoffs for all parties makes this the most comprehensive and valuable account of labor-management innovation in years – and just in time, as the nation turns to the twin challenges of reforming both labor relations and health care.” 

Informal Workers and Collective Action:  A Global Perspective, Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman and Martha A. Chen (eds). Cornell University Press, 2017.  This book explores nine cases of collective action from a diverse set of countries—Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Liberia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uruguay—that focus on two broad types of informal workers: "waged" workers, including port workers, beer promoters, hospitality and retail workers, domestic workers, low-skilled public sector workers, and construction workers; and self-employed workers, including street vendors, waste recyclers, and minibus drivers. These cases demonstrate that workers and labor organizations around the world are rediscovering the lessons of early labor organizers on how to aggregate individuals' sense of injustice into forms of collective action that achieve a level of power that can yield important changes in their work and lives. 

Organizational Change at SEIU - Adrienne Eaton, Ph.D, Janice Fine, Ph.D,  Saul Rubenstein, Ph.D, Allison Prter, MSOD. (1996-2009)
Book chapter: Becoming Purple: Organizational Change at SEIU during the Andy Stern Years

Since the election of Andy Stern in 1996, SEIU has doubled its membership, built a powerful political machine, and become a major force for progressive change. 

This article is a reflection on the enormity of the changes they had made, the leaders of SEIU decided to commission an independent study of their organization from the time the current administration took office to the present.  We took on that task in 2006 and completed it in the summer of 2009.