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  5. Recentralizing Industrial Relations? Local Unions and the Politics of Insourcing in Three North American Automakers

Recentralizing Industrial Relations? Local Unions and the Politics of Insourcing in Three North American Automakers

File(s)
Greer30 Recentralizing.pdf (417.45 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/116086
Collections
ILR Articles and Chapters
Faculty Publications - International and Comparative Labor
Author
Dupuis, Mathieu
Greer, Ian
Abstract

Since the auto industry’s 2008 crisis, the decades-long trend toward outsourcing by the Detroit Three automakers has stalled. During and after the crisis, original equipment manufacturers moved work inside their corporate boundaries, including the purchase of eight previously spun-off parts plants. Why has this happened? Drawing on 77 interviews in the United States and Canada and 27 insourcing cases, the authors explore how and why insourcing has taken place. Past literature has considered the costs and benefits of creating the vertically integrated corporation, the managerial politics behind vertical disintegration, and the labor–management relations that shape both. While much industrial relations scholarship points to decentralized plant-level partnerships as a union strategy to win investment, the authors find that local unionists are intervening in the politics of the corporation above the plant level to influence the purchasing, manufacturing, and engineering functions that determine the sourcing decision.

Date Issued
2022-08
Publisher
SAGE
Keywords
collective bargaining
•
unions
•
outsourcing
•
manufacturing
•
industrial relations and plant closures
•
insourcing
Related DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939211015191
Previously Published as
Dupuis, M., & Greer, I. (2022). Recentralizing industrial relations? Local unions and the politics of insourcing in three North American automakers. Industrial and Relations Review, 75(4), pp. 918-942.
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights URI
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Type
article
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