11/10/22: Suresh Naidu

[GabeNicholson]

Comment below with a well-developed question or comment about the reading for this week's workshop!

If you would really like to ask your question in person, please place two exclamation points before your question to signal that you really want to ask it.

Please post your question by Tuesday 11:59 PM, We will also ask you all to upvote questions that you think were particularly good. There may be prizes for top question askers.

[sdbaier]

Dear Professor Naidu,

Thank you for sharing your work on workplace networks and organizational outcomes. I am particularly curious about how you constructed different worker networks and formulated the two modes of organizing.

(1) I am not sure if the United For Respect field note data covers (or allows to measure) this, but is there any way of assessing the degree to which persuasion is naturally occurring through existing networks versus spreading through newly formed ties because of formal mobilizing efforts? Put differently, given the a priori existence of personal and professional networks among coworkers, is co-worker persuasion wholly an effect of the preexisting network structure? For example, in the Pico Rivera (CA) location, Dora could be bringing other workers to meetings because they have been her long-time connections, or because her goal is to achieve a critical mass of signed cards.

(2) With regards to the two modes of organizing, how do organizers map a workplace network prior to expending their effort? Is this done through observing without intervening? For example, how do we know that Dora is “is clearly central” whereas Juan is not for the Pico Rivera (CA) location.

(3) For the mobilization-driven mode of organizing, how are the most easily persuaded workers who are not already persuaded identified (for organizers) and how is the worker proclivity towards unionizing measured (for researchers)?

Thank you, I am looking forward to your talk this Thursday!

[Dededon]

Dear Professor Naidu, Thank you for sharing about your findings about the U.S. unionization movements! The topic researched has been very inspiring for me so far. So here are my questions:

1. Can you illustrate some more about the data collection process? I wonder whether this methodology could be migrated into researches about social movements.

2. How could future works implement the factor of anti-unionization efforts by the employers? Can they be modeled as coefficients in the De Groot model? Like, two sets of actors competing against each other?

Thank you for noticing!

[mingxuan-he]

Hello Professor Naidu! In the qualitative evidence section of the paper, it appears that some employees are hesitant to join OUR Walmart because they did not "want to be the first person in the store to do so". Did you observe this as a common belief? If so what impact did it have on the structure of membership network? Has it led to high store-level clustering, or even two extreme equilibria following the campaign, where for some stores there is no OUR members and for other stores there are many?

[nswxin]

Hi Professor Naidu！Thank you so much for coming with your meaningful findings. Your study is based on the research and examination of Walmart and I assume that the working population is unique with some particular features. Therefore, my question is will your result vary much if its for different populations and labor groups, for example, teachers at school?

[shaangao]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing your research! I'm interested in knowing more about how you think the effect would potentially be similar & different in workplaces with different hierarchical structures, different ideologies, different levels of initial solidarity, etc. For example, in organizing a graduate student union vs a Walmart worker union.

[KekunH]

Hello Professor Naidu, that is very interesting research. Your finding that using networks in the organizing process is positively associated with organizing outcomes seems very robust, but you also claim that even the best possible networking strategy could not single-handily lead to the success of a campaign. So I would like to hear your personal opinion on why the networking strategy could not have a "game-changer" effect on organizing success.

[zihua-uc]

Dear Prof. Naidu, you brought up the point that technological and organizational changes to facilitate interactions among workers can promote organizing effort and collective action. However, many workers are opting for remote work (work from home) since the pandemic, reducing opportunities for interactions between coworkers. What are your views on this and how it affects the future of labor movements?

[taizeyu]

Dear Prof. Naidu, Thank you for your presentation. I am curious that how can we use the conclusion of this research in the real world. Could we evaluate the cost nd benefit of the workplace? Since always better workplaces are expensive.

[bowen-w-zheng]

Hi Prof. Naidu, Thank you so much for sharing your work. You mentioned that the network structure is intimatedly related to performance outcome - is it possible to construct a even more detailed mechanistic model to explain this process such that one can maximize over the space of network structures given certain constraints?

[JoeHelbing]

Good Morning Professor Naidu,

There was some talk during the Trump administration from the conservative side about the potential for sectoral bargaining as a method both for increasing pre-tax incomes for low wage workers with the secondary benefit (from the perspective of the think tanks discussing the idea) of dismantling Union political power. I'm curious how and whether your research on organizing mixes with the sectoral bargaining system we see in Scandinavian countries and being discussed in the US. Also more generally how you see that sectoral bargaining system's different organizing paradigm potentially effect political and legal structures in the US.

[borlasekn]

Thank you for sharing your work Professor Naidu. One of my interests is looking at education research. As I do this, one of the discussions is the importance of teacher unions, not only in advocating for teacher resources but advocating for student resources as well. I was wondering how you viewed your research fitting in with unions for people who are, technically, state or federal employees versus unions for say, private companies. Is there inherent differences in the network structures of these types of unions, especially given the connection to performance outcomes that might differ by type of union?

[erweinstein]

Hi Professor Naidu,

My question is about the organizer notes and the use of similar types of unstructured qualitative data like them for quantitative social science research. First, I want to say I think it's a great idea to look at these notes to learn about the relationships between employees and how organizers interact with the existing employee networks, so I don't intend to suggest that your approach is unsound. That said, A) How sensitive is this to issues of valence and context, for example, what if in a certain note Employee 1 is telling the organizer that Employee 2 has been actively obstructing their attempts to get a promotion, while Employee 3 has been supportive of them? In your work, it seems like it would be relatively easy to flag possible cases of this issue and verify them with a small amount of researcher or research assistant time, but that too is because we have substantial preexisting knowledge about "relationships among coworkers in a given workplace" as a type of social network and what types of social facts those linkages correspond to. B) Relatedly, You extract two types of information from the notes, "organizer attention to a worker" as measured by number of notes, and "other workers' names in the text of the notes as indicators of relationships between workers..." as measured dichotomously (1 or 0 for whether or not an employee's name is mentioned). This seems like it works well, although other researchers might be tempted to try to extract additional information from the notes or their project's equivalent qualitative data (for example, via sentiment analysis) in ways that are more subjective, and introduce far more "researcher degrees of freedom". So is (part of) the reason you didn't correct for the type of issue I mention in (A) to avoid introducing this extra level of subjectivity? How would you recommend someone facing a similar situation with a similar type of unstructured, note-like qualitative data approach this tradeoff, and the overall researcher decision process about what variables to (attempt to) generate and study from those qualitative data?

[xinyi030]

Dear Prof. Naidu,

Thanks for sharing your great work! This paper constructs a novel measure of network-driven organizing (NDO) based on the relationship between an organizer's attention to a worker and that worker's network centrality. And it is validated that this measure has a positive correlation with workplace campaign success. 

I strong agree with the NDO measure in workplace context. And below is my question: I wonder whether we may use this "positive correlation" to gauge circumstances outside of the workplace. Will children be more effective, for instance, if parents pay more attention to children who cooperate to create a mud castle on a beach? Thanks for your answer!

[LynetteDang]

Thank you so much Professor Naidu for sharing your work with us, I am wondering how do you think a hiring freeze/recession will affect the social networks among workers and network-driven organizing, especially after the COVID-19 pandemics? Thanks!

[edelahayeUChicago]

Hi Professor,

Thank you so much for your paper, it's been my favourite one so far this year! My question relates to how the dynamics of unionisation relates to the degree of monopoly power by the employing firm in their product market (rather than in their labour market) and how the current change of antitrust stance by the Biden Administration might consequently change unionisation. On the one hand, labour organising offers the potential for employees to capture some of the monopoly profit present in a high-market power industry and so more active antitrust action might harm labour's bargaining power (i.e. if the firm faces a real constraint due to competition, it has more credible opposition to wage rises/other demands). But on the other hand if the competition faced by a firm is higher, they might need to keep employees happier to ensure efficiency in an efficiency wage manner (depending on the type of work) and hence increase labour's power.

To what extent do you feel these two policies interact and how do you think the impact of technology on market concentration (rather than on labour productivity) will shape the future of unionisation?

[GuangjieXu]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing your findings. I've recently learned about research ethics and I'm curious how you can meet the four ethical principles of research in your research process?

[awaidyasin]

Hi Prof., thanks for sharing your work. JEP is one of my favorite econ journals to read.

Your article does talk about the effects of unionization and the processes through which that institution could be strengthened in an organization. But I was wondering if unions at the same time could also be a way for certain groups to accumulate power within the employee hierarchy (i.e., it could lead to a power struggle among the employees) and, hence, the utility of a union may be significantly overstated and overemphasized. For instance, an immigrant worker would be way less convinced to form (or even join) a union due to their non-permanent work status (so as not to antagonize the management). But, at the same time, others with a more solid legal foundation might find it beneficial to form a union, therefore, getting themselves represented a lot more in the issues concerning the whole workforce. This might, in turn, create incentives for employees to segregate further and for the firms to hire a higher proportion of international employees, who will be "easier" to work with.

Would be great to hear your thoughts on this!

[JunoWuu]

Hi Prof. Naidu, Thank you for sharing your work. I really like the section where you mentioned the low-wages younger workers. This is closely related to our generations as we are right now the younger workers who are more likely to get minimum wage. While some of the low wages lead to a fast contagion, others are not. I wonder how important this group is in the union and how the contagion moves on really fast.

[ChongyuFang]

Hi Prof. Naidu, thanks a lot for sharing your work with us! Really excited to see an Econ professor here. Could you please give a brief intro on how your research is going to reshape the labor economics literature?

[Peihan12]

Hello Prof.Naidu, thanks for sharing your work! It gives me a brand-new insight into workplace networks and organizational outcomes. Would you have any policy suggestions in terms of organizing different kinds of companies/organizations? Thanks!

[Hongkai040]

Hi Professor Naidu, Thank you so much for sharing your work. If possible, could you elaborate more on the causality design in the lecture? I feel like I can understand the correlation analysis, but I wonder what kinds of assumptions are made to conclude that focus on workplace leaders is a successful determinant?

[sushanz]

Dear Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing and taking time with us! Labor union in economic perspectives is always a hot topic to discuss as under general conditions such a union has a well-behaved objective function. I wish we could hear more how you think of why it is important to have the union existing in the long term and protect our workers benefits in terms of economic and social significant values, as it matters to our day to day life.

[jinyz1220]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing your enlightening work! In the paper, the organizer's attention to a worker was operationalized as " the number of notes indicating a conversation with that worker." I'm wondering if it's possible to include the emotional elements during the conversations or workers' self-reported perceived attention from the workers in the operational definition. In addition, would you expect to find similar associations between NDO and organizing success in other contexts that involves organizing activities and power hierarchy? Thank you!

[BaotongZh]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for bringing us such a great work. After reading your paper, I was just wondering how the unions remain reasonable bargaining power in the market ?

[fiofiofiona]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing your research. I am curious if you would expect the same pattern of workplace networks and organizing outcomes across different industries or all types of workplace? For example, in a hybrid workplace that has both in person and remote workers, which has been very common since the pandemic began, do you expect finding the same result?

[secorey]

Dear Dr. Naidu, Thank you for your presentation. This question is more about the application side of things, but I wonder if by focusing on workers central to a network, there is the implication that social pressure is what is driving workers to sign campaign cards. If people who have well-established social status within a workplace are driving the movement, then others are more likely to conform for the sake of being in a good standing with that person. If this is the case, then do you think that is an ethical method of collecting new members?

[ValAlvernUChic]

Hi Professor Naidu,

Thank you so much for your paper! What really struck me in the paper was the importance of social capital and worker solidarity for unions and how the increasing worker decentralization via hybrid/remote work might complicate that. Besides the immediate shift in labour specialization, I can imagine that a generally increased satisfaction with work might correlate to increased worker inequality. I'm also interested in how unionization in these hybrid workplace environments might look like in the future specifically in what capacities might collective bargaining look like?

Thank you!

[bningdling]

Hi Prof. Naidu,

Thank you for sharing your research with us! According to the paper, even the best possible networking strategy could not single-handily lead to the success of a campaign. I was wondering if you think an ultimate "perfect" strategy is possible to achieve and I'm curious about the practical implications of this argument.

[yjhuang99]

Dear Prof.Naidu,

Thanks for sharing with us! The research findings are quite interesting, especially that workplaces in which organizers who use network-driven organizing have more organizing success. I wonder whether your empirical results can be applied to other similar settings, and the practical suggestions to implement such strategies.

[yhchou0904]

Hi Professor Naidu, Thank you for sharing your idea with us! We do understand the importance of a union and workplace organization, and also that these could indicate different aspects of a company or labor environment. I am just curious about the measurement created in the paper about network-directed organizing. I can understand the potential inference of centrality and organizer effects, but I am not sure how to explain the correlation between these two factors intuitively. Why choose correlation as the way to combine these two?

[Emily-fyeh]

Hi Prof. Naidu, Thanks for sharing your work! I am curious about how you would design your correlation analysis if considering the natures of different types of labor unions--since there are many exogenous factors affecting the interpreting power of network structure to collective actions.

[y8script]

Dear Prof. Naidu, Thank you for sharing this work with us! For the effectiveness of network-driven organizing mentioned in this paper, do you think it can be generalized beyond the scenario of labor movement? When organizing for different purposes (e.g., for work-related improvement / for hobbies) in the company, do you think the network strategy also matters? Also, for organizing campaigns within other contexts of network (e.g. online campaigns that spread through social network), is it possible to examine how network-related properties affects the success of campaign?

[mdvadillo]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing your work with us. Your paper gives a very thorough overview of the benefits of worker unions and plus a clear exposition of the drawbacks businesses consider unions to have. Do you have an idea or an estimate of what conditions could make unions have a detrimental effect on workers themselves? Say incentivizing certain behaviors or disincentivizing others.

[linhui1020]

Hi Prof. Naidu, thanks for your work! I am curious why network-driven organizational success is happened in the workplace. Is it because there are more information flow during the network or the because sour resources are controlled and shared by certain communities?

[tangn121]

Hello professor Naidu, thanks for sharing your work with us! I am impressed by how you constructed network data using organizer field notes. Since the data is from and only from the Walmart database, I wonder if the result is generalizable. Also, are you considering using other datasets to extend the work?

[ddlee19]

Hello Prof. Naidu,

Thank you for your paper and presentation! After reading your paper, I am curious about how online communities of co-workers have interacted and if any discourse regarding labor unions have taken place.

[zhiqianc]

Hi Professor Naidu, Thanks for sharing your work. I am wondering how you consider and choose the controls when examining the robustness of the correlationship.

[yuzhouw313]

Hello Professor Naidu,

Thank you for sharing your paper on the relationship between workplace organization and income organization. Your proposal of analyzing the correlation between organizer attention to a worker and that worker’s network centrality is very interesting, which reminds me of the network analysis from a sociology perspective. Specifically, I am curious about in what forms such network-driven organizational phenomenon took place and is it possible that the correlation between worker's network centrality and organizer's attention to this work is in fact a causal relation. If so, how would you design a new set of study or expand on your original study to target this research question? I look forward to meeting you tomorrow and hearing more of your studies.

[Yuxin-Ji]

Hi Professor Naidu, Thanks for sharing your work. I wonder if there is a specific reason you choose to use data from 2010-2015? Do you think the post-covid changes (such as gradually moving towards online working) affect the network dynamics?

[hazelchc]

Hi Prof. Naidu, thank you very much for sharing your insightful piece of work with us. It is interesting to see that low income is not a strong predictor of union support (as shown in Figure 1). Could you explain the reason behind this interesting phenomenon more in detail? Looking forward to your presentation on Thursday!

[ShiyangLai]

Hi Professor Naidu. Thank you for being there to share your work. It is still unclear to me how you extract the network model. Could you elaborate more on your method? Thanks!

[YijingZhang-98]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing, would consider the spillover effect of productivity be interesting in you current model? Thanks.

[yuanninghuang]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing with us. I was wondering how your framework could fit into the gig economy where workers are loosely, or possibly not connected at all.

[xiaowei-v]

Professor Naidu: Thanks for sharing your work with us! You have mentioned that in the federal case, more effort and more worker were contacted. But in this case, the organizer sort of distributes the efforts more evenly instead of focusing on central workers while the effects of coworker persuasion still exist. I was wondering what could be the actual mechanism of such differences in the outcomes of two different modes. What could be the mechanism of different stragegies driving different outcomes?

[xin2006]

Hi Professor Naidu, thanks for bringing such an interesting topic. In the paper, you discussed the work situation and labor movement most in the U.S.. Considering the globalization of economies and resources, I am curious whether the labor movement in the worldwide is worth considering? What do you think about the influence of work and job globalization on the movement of labor?

[yujing-syj]

Hi Professor Naidu, thanks for sharing this interesting paper with us. You mentioned that "a sharp recession could quickly restore employer temerity to discharge workers and dampen whatever sparks in labor organizing we have now". Is there any solution for this possible issue?

[beilrz]

Hello Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing the paper. Do you the covid pandemic's effect on the labor market and its network structure will be permanent? or will it go back to the pre pandemic state? Thanks

[zhiyun0707]

Hi Professor Naidu, thank you for sharing your research with us! In the paper, I found the Cross-Country Union Density figure interesting that the Scandinavia/Ghent union density demonstrates an increasing trend from 1960-2020 while the other three has a decreasing trend. Could you please explain this more? Thank you!

[LuZhang0128]

Hi professor Naidu! Thank you for the amazing paper. I wonder how you would expect the organizing and labor union to be affected by social media platforms. Is it possible to apply network analysis in such cases? Thanks!

[QichangZheng]

Greetings, Professor Naidu. Thank you for letting us see your work! Your use of organizer field notes to create network data is impressive. I wonder if the conclusion is generalizable, given that the data comes exclusively from the Walmart database. Are you also thinking of extending the work with more datasets?