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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Industrial relations & safety > General
In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla organizes ordinary concerns with one’s abilities to earn a wage, to strengthen one’s body, and to take care of others; it describes the potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom. The ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not obscure the wounding effects of plantation labor or the long history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of what the Algerian artist Kader Attia calls repair. In this captivating ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and working in and around the plantations. As a space of exploitation that enables the global paper and packaging industry to extract labor power, the plantation depends on the availability of creative action in ordinary life to capitalize on bodily capacity. The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories. Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.
Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.
In Conflicting Commitments, Shannon Gleeson goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. Gleeson examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas. Conflicting Commitments reveals two cities with very different approaches to addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers both involving the strategic coordination of a range of bureaucratic brokers, but in strikingly different ways. Drawing on the real life accounts of ordinary workers, federal, state, and local government officials, community organizers, and consular staff, Gleeson argues that local political contexts matter for protecting undocumented workers in particular. Providing a rich description of the bureaucratic minefields of labor law, and the explosive politics of immigrant rights, Gleeson shows how the lessons learned from San Jose and Houston can inform models for upholding labor and human rights in the United States."
Industrial peace is a pre-requisite for smooth and uninterrupted production process in an economy. Industrial relations are a matter of importance not only for the employers and the employees but also for the society at large. In the wake of economic liberalisation sweeping across the world economies, the concept and nature of industrial relations are also undergoing a change. The past philosophy of industrial relations has become comparatively irrelevant in the context of new technology, emerging trade relations, and increased movement of labour and capital across continents. This book examines this most complex and delicate problem of the modern industrial society with reference to India. It analyses various aspects of industrial relations with particular emphasis on trade unions, industrial disputes, collective bargaining, grievance management, workers participation, labour legislations and social security schemes.
Mixing personal history, interviewee voices, and academic theory from the fields of care work, the sociology of work, medical sociology, and nursing, Taking Care of Our Own introduces us to the hidden world of family caregivers. Using a multidimensional approach, Sherry N. Mong seeks to understand and analyze the types of skilled work that family caregivers do, the processes through which they learn and negotiate new skills, and the meanings that both caregivers and nurses attach to their care work. Taking Care of Our Own is based on sixty-two in-depth interviews with family caregivers, home and community health care nurses, and other expert observers to provide a lens through which in-home care processes are analyzed, while also exploring how caregivers learn necessary procedures. Further, Mong examines the emotional labor of caregiving, as well as the identities of caregivers and nurses who are key players in the labor process, and gives attention to the ways in which the labor is transferred from medical professionals to family caregivers.
This book brings a radically new voice to the debate in the field of Chinese politics and labor movement. Using a psychological and cognitive approach, the author examines workers and activists' everyday interpretation of the source of their problems, their prospect of labor movements, and their sense of solidarity. The project shows how workers themselves have become a part of the apparatus of state repression and argues that Chinese workers have not acquired sufficient cognitive strength to become the much hoped-for agent for political change, which hinders labor activism from developing into a sustainable social movement. Multidisciplinary in its approach, the monograph provides analysis of Chinese politics, labor studies, international political economy, social movements, and contentious politics.
Agrarian radicalism's challenge to capitalism played a central role in working-class ideology while making third parties and protest movements a potent force in politics. Thomas Alter II follows three generations of German immigrants in Texas to examine the evolution of agrarian radicalism and the American and transnational ideas that influenced it. Otto Meitzen left Prussia for Texas in the wake of the failed 1848 Revolution. His son and grandson took part in decades-long activism with organizations from the Greenback Labor Party and the Grange to the Populist movement and Texas Socialist Party. As Alter tells their stories, he analyzes the southern wing of the era's farmer-labor bloc and the parallel history of African American political struggle in Texas. Alliances with Mexican revolutionaries, Irish militants, and others shaped an international legacy of working-class radicalism that moved U.S. politics to the left. That legacy, in turn, pushed forward economic reform during the Progressive and New Deal eras. A rare look at the German roots of radicalism in Texas, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth illuminates the labor movements and populist ideas that changed the nation's course at a pivotal time in its history.
This book addresses information technologies recently applied in the field of construction safety. Combining case studies, literature reviews and interviews to study the issue, it presents cutting-edge applications of various information technologies (ITs) in construction in different parts of the world, together with a wealth of figures, tables and examples. Though primarily intended for researchers and experts in the field, the book will also benefit graduate students.
How America's biggest company began taking better care of its workers--and why such efforts will never be enough.Fifteen years ago, Walmart was the most controversial company in America. By offering incredibly low prices, it had come to dominate the retail landscape. But with this dominance came a suite of ethical concerns. Walmart was accused of wiping out of mom-and-pop businesses across the country; ruthlessly pressuring suppliers to cut costs, even if it meant closing up U.S. factories and moving production overseas; and, above all, not taking adequate care of its own employees, who were paid so little that many wound up on public assistance. Today, while Walmart remains America's largest employer, the picture is very different. It has become an environmental leader among businesses, and has taken many other steps to use its immense scale to have a positive social impact. Most notably, its starting wage has risen from $7.25 to $12, and employee benefits have improved. With internal and external threats to its business looming, the company began to change directions in 2005-a transformation that accelerated in 2014, with the arrival of CEO Doug McMillon. By undertaking such large-scale change without a legal mandate to do so, Walmart has joined a number of major corporations that say they are dedicated to practicing a new, socially conscious form of capitalism.In Still Broke, award-winning author Rick Wartzman goes inside the company's transformation, showing in novelistic detail how the company has gotten to where it is. Yet he also asks a critical question: is it enough? With a still-simmering public debate around the minimum wage and widespread movements by workers demanding better treatment, how far will $12 an hour go in today's economy? Or even $15? Or Walmart's average wage, which now hovers above $16-but, even so, doesn't pencil out to so much as $35,000 a year for a fulltime worker? In the richest nation on earth, how did the bar get set so low? How did America find itself relying on an army of low-wage workers without ever acknowledging their most basic needs? And if Walmart's brand of change is the best we have, how can we ever expect to build a healthy society?With unparalleled access to the key executives and change-makers at Walmart, Still Broke does more than document a remarkable business makeover. It interrogates the role of business in American life, and asks what the future of our economy and country can be-and whose job it is to make it.
The decline of the U.S. textile and apparel industries between the 1940s and 1970s helped lay the groundwork for the twenty-first century's potent economic populism in America. James C. Benton looks at how shortsighted trade and economic policy by labor, business, and government undermined an employment sector that once employed millions and supported countless communities. Starting in the 1930s, Benton examines how the New Deal combined promoting trade with weakening worker rights. He then moves to the ineffective attempts to aid textile and apparel workers even as imports surged, the 1974 pivot by policymakers and big business to institute lowered trade barriers, and the deindustrialization and economic devastation that followed. Throughout, Benton provides the often-overlooked views of workers, executives, and federal officials who instituted the United States' policy framework in the 1930s and guided it through the ensuing decades. Compelling and comprehensive, Fraying Fabric explains what happened to textile and apparel manufacturing and how it played a role in today's politics of anger.
The long relationship between America’s colonizing wars and virulent anticommunism The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.” Original and boldly argued, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean offers an enlightening new history with relevance for our own time.
In response to mounting debt crises and macroeconomic instability in the 1980s, many countries in the developing world adopted neoliberal policies promoting the unfettered play of market forces and deregulation of the economy and attempted large-scale structural adjustment, including the privatization of public-sector industries. How much influence did various societal groups have on this transition to a market economy, and what explains the variances in interest-group influence across countries? In this book, Agnieszka Paczyńska explores these questions by studying the role of organized labor in the transition process in four countries in different regions--the Czech Republic and Poland in eastern Europe, Egypt in the Middle East, and Mexico in Latin America. In Egypt and Poland, she shows, labor had substantial influence on the process, whereas in the Czech Republic and Mexico it did not. Her explanation highlights the complex relationship between institutional structures and the "critical junctures" provided by economic crises, revealing that the ability of groups like organized labor to wield influence on reform efforts depends to a great extent on not only their current resources (such as financial autonomy and legal prerogatives) but also the historical legacies of their past ties to the state. This new edition features an epilogue that analyzes the role of organized labor uprisings in 2011, the protests in Egypt, the overthrow of Mubarak, and the post-Mubarak regime.
The long relationship between America’s colonizing wars and virulent anticommunism The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.” Original and boldly argued, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean offers an enlightening new history with relevance for our own time.
Stephen Meyer charts the complex vagaries of men reinventing manhood in twentieth century America. Their ideas of masculinity destroyed by principles of mass production, workers created a white-dominated culture that defended its turf against other racial groups and revived a crude, hypersexualized treatment of women that went far beyond the shop floor. At the same time, they recast unionization battles as manly struggles against a system killing their very selves. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Meyer recreates a social milieu in stunning detail--the mean labor and stolen pleasures, the battles on the street and in the soul, and a masculinity that expressed itself in violence and sexism but also as a wellspring of the fortitude necessary to maintain one's dignity while doing hard work in hard world.
Rapid changes within the modern business landscape have created new demands for human resources management. With a different set of challenges to face, human resources managers must implement novel approaches to improve policy effectiveness. Strategic Labor Relations Management in Modern Organizations is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on emerging human resource practices in relation to labor management, featuring innovative methods to remain competitive in the global business arena. Focusing on critical analyses and real-world applications, this book is ideally designed for professionals, upper-level students, managers, and researchers actively involved in human resources settings.
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