In Union Voices, the result of a thirteen-year research project, three industrial relations scholars evaluate how labor unions fared in the political and institutional context created by Great Britain's New Labour government, which was in power from 1997 to 2010. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence, Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery present a multilevel analysis of what organizing means in the UK, how it emerged, and what its impact has been.

Although the supportive legislation of the New Labour government led to considerable optimism in the late 1990s about the prospects for renewal, Simms, Holgate, and Heery argue that despite considerable evidence of investment, new practices, and innovation, UK unions have largely failed to see any significant change in their membership and influence. The authors argue that this is because of the wider context within which organizing activity takes place and also reflects the fundamental tensions within these initiatives. Even without evidence of any significant growth in labor influence across UK society more broadly, organizing campaigns have given many of the participants an opportunity to grow and flourish. The book presents their experiences and uses them to show how their personal commitment to organizing and trade unionism can sometimes be undermined by the tensions and tactics used during campaigns.

The dramatic story of Chile's coal miners in the mid-twentieth century has never before been told. In Mining for the Nation, Jody Pavilack shows how this significant working-class sector became a stronghold of support for the Communist Party as it embraced cross-class alliances aimed at defeating fascism, promoting national development, and deepening Chilean democracy. During the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s, the coal miners emerged as a powerful social and political base that came to be seen as a threat to existing hierarchies and interests. Pavilack carries the story through the end of World War II, when a centrist president elected with crucial Communist backing brutally repressed the coal miners and their families in what has become known as the Great Betrayal, ushering Cold War politics into Chile with force. The patriotic fervor and tragic outcome of the coal miners' participation in Popular Front coalition politics left an important legacy for those who would continue the battle for greater social justice in Chile in the coming decades.

When unions undertake labor organizing campaigns, they often do so from strong moral positions, contrasting workers' rights to decent pay or better working conditions with the more venal financial motives of management. But how does labor confront management when management itself has moral legitimacy? In With God on Our Side, Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California. Based on his own work as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Reich explores how both union leaders and hospital leaders sought to show they were upholding the Catholic "mission" of the hospital against a market represented by the other. Ultimately, workers and union leaders were able to reinterpret Catholic values in ways that supported their efforts to organize.

More generally, Reich argues that unions must weave together economic and cultural power in order to ensure their continued relevancy in the postindustrial world. In addition to advocating for workers' economic interests, unions must engage with workers' emotional investments in their work, must contend with the kind of moral authority that Santa Rosa Hospital leaders exerted to dissuade workers from organizing, and must connect labor s project to broader conceptions of the public good."

Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated layoffs have become part of working life. In A Company of One, Carrie M. Lane finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, Lane shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent "companies of one."

Following the experiences of individual jobseekers over time, Lane explores the central role that organized networking events, working spouses, and neoliberal ideology play in forging and reinforcing a new individualist, pro-market response to the increasingly insecure nature of contemporary employment. She also explores how this new perspective is transforming traditional ideas about masculinity and the role of men as breadwinners. Sympathetic to the benefits that this "company of one" ideology can hold for its adherents, Lane also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely.

This is the story of struggles against management regimes in the car industry in Britain from the period after the Second World War until the contemporary regime of lean production. Told from the viewpoint of the workers, the book chronicles how workers responded to a variety of management and union strategies, from piece rate working, through measured day work, and eventually to lean production beginning in the late 1980s. The book focuses on two companies, Vauxhall-GM and Rover/BMW, and how they developed their aroaches to managing labour relations. Worker responses to these are intimately tied to changing patterns of exploitation in the industry. The book highlights the relative success of various forms of struggle to establish safer and more humane working environments. The contributors bring together original research gathered over two decades, plus exclusive surveys of workers in four automotive final assembly plants over a ten year period.

This collection of compelling and original research makes connections in Canada, the US and Mexico among women who work in fast-food restaurants, supermarkets and agricultural production. The fourteen chapters take a critical look at how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has affected these women's working and living conditions, sharpening our understanding of how the workplace has been restructured in order to fulfill consumer demands for tomatoes, exotic flowers and fruits, as well as fast-food burgers and fries. Food activists in Latin America, the US and Canada propose alternatives to counteract the oppressive conditions of free trade and globalization.

Life As We Have Known It is a unique view of lives Virginia Woolf described as 'still half hidden in profound obscurity.' the women write about growing up in poverty, going into domestic service, being a hat factory worker, or a miner's wife concerned about the colliery baths, and how they become politically active through the Women's Co-operative Guild movement.

Alike in many aspects of their histories, Australia and the United States diverge in striking ways when it comes to their working classes, labor relations, and politics. Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations' differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I's impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics. Throughout, many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other's trade union and political cultures. Contributors: Robin Archer, Nikola Balnave, James R. Barrett, Bradley Bowden, Verity Burgmann, Robert Cherny, Peter Clayworth, Tom Goyens, Dianne Hall, Benjamin Huf, Jennie Jeppesen, Marjorie A. Jerrard, Jeffrey A. Johnson, Diane Kirkby, Elizabeth Malcolm, Patrick O'Leary, Greg Patmore, Scott Stephenson, Peta Stevenson-Clarke, Shelton Stromquist, and Nathan Wise

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni

The labor movement in the United States is a bulwark of democracy and a driving force for social and economic equality. Yet its stories remain largely unknown to Americans. Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti edit a collection of essays focused on nationwide efforts to propel the history of labor and working people into mainstream narratives of US history. In Part One, the contributors concentrate on ways to collect and interpret worker-oriented history for public consumption. Part Two moves from National Park sites to murals to examine the writing and visual representation of labor history. Together, the essayists explore how place-based labor history initiatives promote understanding of past struggles, create awareness of present challenges, and support efforts to build power, expand democracy, and achieve justice for working people. A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism. Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linne, Erik Loomis, Tom MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan, Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. The essays in this collection examine the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. A diverse roster of contributors discuss how participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. They also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. Contributors: Kristen Anderson, Daniel E. Atkinson, James R. Barrett, Susan Roth Breitzer, Susan Chandler, Sam Davies, Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Colin Gordon, Michael Innis-Jimenez, Stephanie Luce, Joseph A. McCartin, John W. McKerley, Matthew M. Mettler, Stephen Meyer, David Montgomery, Kim E. Nielsen, Peter Rachleff, Ralph Scharnau, Jennifer Sherer, Shelton Stromquist, Emily E. LB. Twarog, and John Williams-Searle.

Dynamic Risk Analysis in the Chemical and Petroleum Industry focuses on bridging the gap between research and industry by responding to the following questions: What are the most relevant developments of risk analysis? How can these studies help industry in the prevention of major accidents? Paltrinieri and Khan provide support for professionals who plan to improve risk analysis by introducing innovative techniques and exploiting the potential of data share and process technologies. This concrete reference within an ever-growing variety of innovations will be most helpful to process safety managers, HSE managers, safety engineers and safety engineering students. This book is divided into four parts. The Introduction provides an overview of the state-of-the-art risk analysis methods and the most up-to-date popular definitions of accident scenarios. The second section on Dynamic Risk Analysis shows the dynamic evolution of risk analysis and covers Hazard Identification, Frequency Analysis, Consequence Analysis and Establishing the Risk Picture. The third section on Interaction with Parallel Disciplines illustrates the interaction between risk analysis and other disciplines from parallel fields, such as the nuclear, the economic and the financial sectors. The final section on Dynamic Risk Management addresses risk management, which may dynamically learn from itself and improve in a spiral process leading to a resilient system.

During the 1950s and 1960s, labor leaders Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway championed a new kind of labor movement that regarded workers as "total persons" interested in both workplace affairs and the exercise of effective citizenship in their communities. Working through Teamsters Local 688 and viewing the city of St. Louis as their laboratory, this remarkable interracial duo forged a dynamic political alliance that placed their "citizen members" on the front lines of epic battles for urban revitalization, improved public services, and the advancement of racial and economic justice. Parallel to their political partnership, Gibbons functioned as a top Teamsters Union leader and Calloway as an influential figure in St. Louis's civil rights movement. Their pioneering efforts not only altered St. Louis's social and political landscape but also raised fundamental questions about the fate of the post-industrial city, the meaning of citizenship, and the role of unions in shaping American democracy.

Activist, labor scholar, and organizer Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) was a leading advocate for Mexican Americans and one of the most important Mexican American scholars and activists after World War II. This volume gathers Galarza's key writings, reflecting an intellectual rigor, conceptual clarity, and a constructive concern for the working class in the face of America's growing influence over Mexico's economic system. Throughout his life, Galarza confronted and analyzed some of the most momentous social transformations of the twentieth century. Inspired by his youthful experience as a farm laborer in Sacramento, he dedicated his life to the struggle for justice for farm workers and urban working-class Latinos and helped build the first multiracial farm workers union, setting the foundation for the emergence of the United Farm Workers Union. He worked to change existing educational philosophies and curricula in schools, and his civil rights legacy includes the founding of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). In 1979, Galarza was the first U.S. Latino to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for works such as Strangers in Our Fields, Merchants of Labor, Barrio Boy, and Tragedy at Chualar.

The first comprehensive biography of progressive labor organizer, peace worker, and economist Clinton Jencks (1918-2005), this book explores the life of one of the most important political and social activists to appear in the Southwestern United States in the twentieth century. A key figure in the radical International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) Local 890 in Grant County, New Mexico, Jencks was involved in organizing not only the mine workers but also their wives in the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company. He was active in the production of the 1954 landmark labor film dramatizing the Empire Zinc strike, Salt of the Earth, which was heavily suppressed during the McCarthy era and led to Jencks's persecution by the federal government. Labor historian James J. Lorence examines the interaction between Jencks's personal experience and the broader forces that marked the world and society in which he worked and lived. Following the work of Jencks and his equally progressive wife, Virginia Derr Jencks, Lorence illuminates the roots and character of Southwestern unionism, the role of radicalism in the Mexican-American civil rights movement, the rise of working-class feminism within Local 890 and the Grant County Mexican American community, and the development of Mexican-American identity in the Southwest. Chronicling Jencks's five-year-long legal battle against charges of perjury, this biography also illustrates how civil liberties and American labor were constrained by the specter of anticommunism during the Cold War. Drawing from extensive research as well as interviews and correspondence, this volume highlights Clinton Jencks's dramatic influence on the history of labor culture in the Southwest through a lifetime devoted to progress and change for the social good.

The experiment with neoliberal market-oriented economic policy in Latin America, popularly known as the Washington Consensus, has run its course. With left-wing and populist regimes now in power in many countries, there is much debate about what direction economic policy should be taking, and there are those who believe that state-led development might be worth trying again. Susan Gauss's study of the process by which Mexico transformed from a largely agrarian society into an urban, industrialized one in the two decades following the end of the Revolution is especially timely and may have lessons to offer to policy makers today.

The image of a strong, centralized corporatist state led by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) from the 1940s conceals what was actually a prolonged, messy process of debate and negotiation among the postrevolutionary state, labor, and regionally based industrial elites to define the nationalist project. Made in Mexico focuses on the distinctive nature of what happened in the four regions studied in detail: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla. It shows how industrialism enabled recalcitrant elites to maintain a regionally grounded preserve of local authority outside of formal ruling-party institutions, balancing the tensions among centralization, consolidation of growth, and Mexico's deep legacies of regional authority.

This is the story of struggles against management regimes in the car industry in Britain from the period after the Second World War until the contemporary regime of lean production. Told from the viewpoint of the workers, the book chronicles how workers responded to a variety of management and union strategies, from piece rate working, through measured day work, and eventually to lean production beginning in the late 1980s. The book focuses on two companies, Vauxhall-GM and Rover/BMW, and how they developed their aroaches to managing labour relations. Worker responses to these are intimately tied to changing patterns of exploitation in the industry. The book highlights the relative success of various forms of struggle to establish safer and more humane working environments. The contributors bring together original research gathered over two decades, plus exclusive surveys of workers in four automotive final assembly plants over a ten year period.

The fast-food industry is one of the few industries that can be described as truly global, not least in terms of employment, which is estimated at around ten million people worldwide. This edited volume is the first of its kind, providing an analysis of labour relations in this significant industry focusing on multinational corporations and large national companies in ten countries: the USA, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Russia.
The extent to which multinational enterprises impose or adapt their employment practices in differing national industrial relations systems is analysed, Results reveal that the global fast-food industry is typified by trade union exclusion, high labour turnover, unskilled work, paternalistic management regimes and work organization that allows little scope for developing workers' participation in decision-making, let alone advocating widely accepted concepts of social justice and workers' rights.

Until recently, the study of industrial relations centred around trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes - often in the manufacturing industry. Union decline and de-industrialization in the advanced capitalist world have raised major issues about the relevance of this focus. As a result, there is growing interest in alternative forms of worker representation, often in conjunction with HRM. But union decline is by no means universal, even in Europe, and there are regions of the world (South East Asia, some African countries and parts of Latin America) where unions are powerful and growing organizations. This set is designed to capture both the complexity of the field of industrial relations globally, as well as bring out the continuing relevance of competing theoretical approaches to the subject. The selection will cover neglected topics such as feminism, debates about post-modernism and the links between labour movements and politics.

Sicherheitsmanagement im Betrieb ist fur Sicherheitsbeauftragte und andere verantwortliche Fachkrafte eine komplexe Herausforderung. Das Standardwerk beschreibt auf uber 500 Seiten die wichtigsten Grundlagen fur ein vernetztes Sicherheitsmanagement: Wie lassen sich die Teildisziplinen Risikomanagement, Sicherheits- und Gesundheitsschutzmanagement, Umweltschutzmanagement, Datenschutzmanagement und Krisenmanagement moeglichst effizient integrieren? Der in dem Buch beschriebene Ansatz bildet einen Bezugsrahmen fur das Verhalten der Mitarbeiter und maximiert die Lebensfahigkeit des Unternehmens. Somit sind ganzheitlich verstandene Betriebssicherheit, Compliance und Risikomanagement ein nicht zu unterschatzender Wirtschaftsfaktor. UEbersichtlich, praxisorientiert und gut lesbar stellen die Autoren die Moeglichkeiten eines vernetzten Betriebssicherheitsmanagementkonzeptes vor. Das Ziel ist, ein moeglichst optimal strukturiertes Vorgehen und ein vernetztes Wirken. Dazu gehoeren die Definition und Beherrschung der betrieblichen Risiken genauso wie die Schaffung einer praventiven Unternehmenskultur und die Sicherstellung der Compliance fur Vorstande und Fuhrungskrafte. Auch die neue VDI-Richtlinie 4055 "Betriebssicherheitsmanagement" wird in dem Band erlautert. Das Buch richtet sich an Fachkrafte und Experten fur Betriebssicherheit und eignet sich als Lehrbuch fur Weiterbildungen und Studiengange im Bereich Betriebssicherheitsmanagement und Sicherheitstechnik. Der Anhang enthalt Checklisten und weiteres Material, das Fachkrafte bei der Umsetzung eines integrierten Sicherheitsmanagements unterstutzt.

Die Turkei und die Europaische Union verbindet eine 40-jahrige Geschichte. Ob Osmanisches Reich oder heutige Turkei - immer gab es ein wechselvolles Auf und Ab. Im Osmanischen Reich begann der Verwestlichungsprozess mit der Charta Hatt-i Humayun im Jahre 1839. Mit dieser Charta, einem verfassungsahnlichen Erlass, wurde in den Bereichen OEkonomie und Politik die Umwandlung nach westlichem Vorbild in Gang gesetzt. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit liegt darin, die Problematik des turkischen EU-Beitritts herauszuarbeiten. Der Schwerpunkt befasst sich mit der politischen, sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Integration der Turkei in die EU, besonders aber mit dem Zeitraum von der Ablehnung des Mitgliedschaftsantrages 1990 bis hin zum Beginn der Verhandlungen im Jahr 2004.

An den Grenzen in Europa ist ein paradoxer Sachverhalt zu beobachten: Einerseits gewinnt die Grenzuberschreitung von Menschen und Waren zunehmend an Bedeutung, andererseits entwickeln sich parallel dazu neue Grenzziehungen. Im Vordergrund des Sammelbandes steht daher die Frage, wie sich die Funktion und Wahrnehmung der nationalen Grenze in Europa politisch, oekonomisch und sozial verandert hat. In den Beitragen wird die These vertreten, dass die EU-Grenzpolitik sich zwar erheblich verandert hat, diese Veranderung jedoch nicht zu einem Wegfall, sondern zu einer Verschiebung von Grenzziehungen fuhrt: Die alten politischen Grenzen bestehen durch neue Grenzziehungen weiter oder werden durch solche ersetzt, die politisch und sozial auf den alten aufbauen.

About 27.5 million Americans nearly 24 percent of the labor force earn less than $8.70 an hour, not enough to keep a family of four out of poverty, even working full-time year-round. Job ladders for these workers have been dismantled, limiting their ability to get ahead in today s labor market. Low-Wage America is the most extensive study to date of how the choices employers make in response to economic globalization, industry deregulation, and advances in information technology affect the lives of tens of millions of workers at the bottom of the wage distribution. Based on data from hundreds of establishments in twenty-five industries including manufacturing, telecommunications, hospitality, and health care the case studies document how firms responses to economic restructuring often results in harsh working conditions, reduced benefits, and fewer opportunities for advancement. For instance, increased pressure for profits in newly consolidated hotel chains has led to cost-cutting strategies such as requiring maids to increase the number of rooms they clean by 50 percent. Technological changes in the organization of call centers the ultimate disposable workplace have led to monitoring of operators work performance, and eroded job ladders. Other chapters show how the temporary staffing industry has provided paths to better work for some, but to dead end jobs for many others; how new technology has reorganized work in the back offices of banks, raising skill requirements for workers; and how increased competition from abroad has forced U.S. manufacturers to cut costs by reducing wages and speeding production. Although employers responses to economic pressures have had a generally negative effect on frontline workers, some employers manage to resist this trend and still compete successfully. The benefits to workers of multi-employer training consortia and the continuing relevance of unions offer important clues about what public policy can do to support the job prospects of this vast, but largely overlooked segment of the American workforce. Low-Wage America challenges us to a national self-examination about the nature of low-wage work in this country and asks whether we are willing to tolerate the profound social and economic consequences entailed by these jobs."