Voluntary organizations vary significantly in the demands they make of members. Political parties, labor unions, religious associations, and a wide variety of interest groups exhibit tremendous variation in their expectations of adherents. This project is concerned with cases where the organization demands self-sacrifice. It focuses on a union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), whose organizational culture provokes membership commitments to cooperation and sacrifice and has continued to do so for more than seventy years, despite major demographic, technological, and political changes. The project will collect data for examining the influence of union membership and organization on the political attitudes and activities of working people. These data will help establish the sources of belief change and preference development in organizations more generally.
The research approach uses surveys, focused interviews, electoral data analysis, ethnographic field work, and formal modeling and builds on findings from the comparative, historical, and qualitative case studies of the investigator's earlier research. The result will be nuanced and detailed data that capture workers' perspectives over time while providing evidence for how the union changes members' beliefs. The investigators have extraordinary access to the kind of data needed to evaluate the project's main arguments-both in the past and the present. The randomized selection of applicants for jobs as newly registered Identified Casuals, the nomenclature for those workers on the first of the occupational rungs of longshore work, approximates a natural experiment, and the ILWU has permitted interviews of these new as well as existing workers on several major West Coast docks. The union is also permitting repeat surveys several times over the next years.
The survey allows for a comparison of the preferences, beliefs, attitudes, and political participation levels of incoming and existing workers over time. The survey gathers standard demographic information and, most importantly for this study, information concerning respondents' perspectives on politics, economics, unions, and the ILWU. The panel design of the survey allows the investigators to track changes over time and determine if and in what directions the views, beliefs, and reported behaviors of the new cohort of workers change as their immersion in the occupational community lengthens. The three survey waves will reveal: 1) how much the views of new waterfront employees converge with more long-serving workers; 2) how, if at all, the union's training and the experience of a contract negotiation shapes their attitudes; and 3) the extent to which the new workers transform the union.
While the empirical focus of this study is labor unions, the argument is broadly applicable to virtually all types of voluntary organizations. Understanding the nature of the causal link between organizational practices, belief change, and how members rank preferences has significant broader implications for policymakers concerned with a range of ideologically-motivated behaviors, including those exhibited by some of the groups involved in some the world's most pressing conflicts.
