The Landrum-Griffin Act and Union Democracy

The Landrum-Griffin Act and Union Democracy is the result of a two-year study conducted by the authors that involved well over one hundred in-depth interviews with union officers, labor lawyers, dissident union members and their advocates, academicians, and U.S. Department of Labor personnel charged with enforcing the Act, as well as with a few management representatives. In addition, rank-and-file members’ knowledge of the Act and their assessment of their ability to exercise the rights accorded them under the Act were studied by means of the inclusion of a set of questions in three separate surveys conducted by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center two nationwide and one involving the greater Detroit Metropolitan area. Participation in the three surveys enabled the authors to reach an additional 677 union members who would have been difficult to contact by any other means.