The manner in which financial market developments permeate labor and industrial relations may explain many of the pressing phenomena of our times-economic instability, jobless recoveries, and high income and wealth inequality. Financial market trends influence hiring and compensation decisions, change managerial outlooks, steer investments and technology, and strain collective bargaining agreements. Inequality, Uncertainty, and Opportunity provides readers with a sense of the many ways in which financial market developments influence labor and industrial relations. A proliferation of financial goods and services and an increasing focus on short-term financial performance measures largely dominated developed economies' development for more than three decades. These trends directly affect the fundamental macroeconomic relationships, such as economic growth and job creation, for firm behavior, particularly with respect to hiring and productive investments, and for individual decision making, as in the realm of retirement savings. Economies have become less stable, job creation has become more tenuous, and income inequality has soared. Contributors: Eileen Appelbaum, Center for Economic and Policy Research; Rose Batt, Cornell University; Sara M Bernardo, University of Massachusetts Boston; Joseph Blasi, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations; Janet Boguslaw, Brandeis University; Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, University of Illinois; Klaus Doerre, University of Jena, Germany; Teresa Ghilarducci, New School University; Adam Hersh, Center for American Progress; William Lazonick, University of Massachusetts Lowell; David Madland, Center for American Progress; Joelle Saad-Lessler, New School University; Christian E. Weller, University of Massachusetts Boston; Dan Weltmann, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations; Jeffrey Wenger, University of Georgia; Edward N. Wolff, New York University

'The most comprehensive and authoritative comparative analysis of employment relations ...' Thomas Kochan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States'...breaks new ground as an integrated account of the forces shaping employment relations.' William Brown, University of Cambridge. United KingdomEstablished as the standard reference for a worldwide readership of students, scholars and practitioners in international agencies, governments, companies and unions, this text offers a systematic overview of international employment relations.Chapters cover the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, China and India. Experts examine the context of employment relations in each country: economic, historical, legal, social and political. They consider the roles of the major players: employers, unions and governments. They outline the processes of employment relations: collective bargaining and arbitration, consultation and employee involvement. Topical issues are discussed: non-unionised workplaces, novel forms of human resource management, labour law reform, multinational enterprises, networked organisations, differences between Asian and Western companies, small and medium-sized enterprises, migrant workers, technological change, labour market flexibility and pay determination.This sixth edition is fully revised with an emphasis on globalisation and comparative theories, including concepts of convergence. It offers a new framework for varieties of capitalism in the Introduction, and concludes with an insightful account of the forces shaping employment relations in the world economy.

This third edition of Building a Better World offers a comprehensive introductory overview of Canada's labour movement. The book includes an analysis of why workers form unions; assesses their organization and democratic potential; examines issues related to collective bargaining, grievances and strike activity; charts the historical development of labour unions; and describes the gains unions have achieved for their members and all working people.

From the 1870s to the 1930s, the Lake Superior Ojibwes of Minnesota and Wisconsin faced dramatic economic, political, and social changes. Examining a period that began with the tribe's removal to reservations and closed with the Indian New Deal, Chantal Norrgard explores the critical link between Ojibwes' efforts to maintain their tribal sovereignty and their labor traditions and practices. As Norrgard explains, the tribe's "seasonal round" of subsistence-based labor was integral to its survival and identity. Though encroaching white settlement challenged these labor practices, Ojibwe people negotiated treaties that protected their rights to make a living by hunting, fishing, and berrying and through work in the fur trade, the lumber industry, and tourism. Norrgard shows how the tribe strategically used treaty rights claims over time to uphold its right to work and to maintain the rhythm and texture of traditional Ojibwe life. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including New Deal@-era interviews with Ojibwe people, Norrgard demonstrates that while American expansion curtailed the Ojibwes' land base and sovereignty, the tribe nevertheless used treaty-protected labor to sustain its lifeways and meet economic and political needs--a process of self-determination that continues today.

In Songs of the Factory, Marek Korczynski examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. Reporting on his ethnographic fieldwork in a British factory that manufactures window blinds, Korczynski shows how workers make often-grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, Songs of the Factory draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life.

Music, Korczynski argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The author highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, Korczynski also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.

Accounts of the Arab Spring often focus on the role of youth coalitions, the use of social media, and the tactics of the Tahrir Square occupation. This authoritative and original book argues that collective action by organised workers played a fundamental role in the Egyptian revolution, which erupted after years of strikes and social protests. Drawing on the authors' decade-long experience of reporting on and researching the Egyptian labour movement, the book provides the first in-depth account of the emergence of independent trade unions and workers' militancy during Mubarak's last years in power, and and their destabilising impact on the post-revolutionary regimes.

Welcher Angestellte hat sich noch nie ein Leben mit all jenen Annehmlichkeiten und personlichen Freiraumen gewunscht, die sonst nur einem Freiberuflichen oder Selbststandigen vorbehalten sind? Auch unter der Woche einmal Auszuschlafen, am Vormittag einen Einkaufsbummel zu machen oder am Nachmittag zwei Stunden zum Sport zu gehen? Warum an einem heissen Sommernachmittag das Buro nicht eher verlassen und den Laptop mit ins Schwimmbad nehmen, die E-Mails abends beantworten oder die liegen gebliebene Arbeit am Wochenende aufarbeiten? Was spricht dagegen? Ist das arbeitsrechtlich nicht moglich oder bislang gesellschaftlich einfach nur unublich bzw. nicht akzeptiert? Sind strenge Anwesenheitskontrollen mit Stechuhr und das abendliche gegenseitige Aussitzen" der Kollegen wirklich entscheidende Leistungskriterien in unserer Arbeitswelt? Wie ist es in wirtschaftlich schwierigen Zeiten uberhaupt moglich, dass profitorientierte Unternehmen es stillschweigend hinnehmen, wenn ihre Mitarbeiter Zeit am Arbeitsplatz totschlagen, im Internet surfen, Kaffeepausen einlegen und sich auf ausgedehnte Plauscherln" unter Kollegen treffen? Akzeptieren sie derartige Verhaltensweisen nur, um sicher zu gehen, dass die Angestellten auch tatsachlich anwesend sind und deren vorgeschriebene Anwesenheitszeit ordnungsgemass ableisten? Ist physische Anwesenheit wichtiger als Produktivitat? Ware eine zeitunabhangige Leistungsmessung anhand von Output und Zielvorgaben nicht wesentlich sinnvoller? Und welche Rollen spielen der demographische Wandel und die technische Mobilisierung bei dieser Uberlegung? Fakt ist, dass der Ruf nach mehr Freiheit und Flexibilitat im Berufsleben immer lauter wird, vor allem bei den unselbststandig Erwerbstatigen. Begunstigt wird dieser Wunsch durch den Eintritt einer neuen Generation in den Arbeitsmarkt, der sogenannten Generation Y." Einer Generation, die die Macht der Demografie hinter sich weiss, und dementsprechend kompromisslos ihre konkreten Forderungen an ihre ku

The Jonathan Presidency provides a comprehensive and unique analysis of Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan s first twelve months in office. The Jonathan Presidency analyzes the ability of the featured Nigerian politicians to deliver their electoral promises, protect and uphold the Nigerian Constitution, and sustain a transparent, citizen-friendly administration."

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) provides workers with minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labour protections. The FLSA covers most, but not all, private and public sector employees. In addition, certain employers and employees are exempt from coverage. Provisions of the FLSA that are of current interest to Congress include the basic minimum wage, sub-minimum wage rates, exemptions from overtime and the minimum wage for persons who provide companionship services, the exemption for employees in computer-related occupations, compensatory time in lieu of overtime pay, and break time for nursing mothers. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) recognises the right of employees to engage in collective bargaining through representatives of their own choosing. By "encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining," the Act attempts to mitigate and eliminate labour-related obstructions to the free flow of commerce. Although union membership has declined dramatically since the 1950s, congressional interest in the NLRA remains significant. This book provides an overview of both the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act with a focus on coverage, amendments and policy.

This report examines the fundamental link between Mexico's economic performance and migration to the United States, with a particular focus on the post-NAFTA time period. Also examined is the dramatic decline of Mexican migration to the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and its implications for immigration reform in the United States. Finally, the report discusses the growing flows of unauthorized migrants from Central America and what regional governments can do to address the issue.

The Polish crisis in the early 1980s provoked a great deal of reaction in the West. Not only governments, but social movements were also touched by the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarnosc in the summer of 1980, the proclamation of martial law in December 1981, and Solidarnosc's underground activity in the subsequent years. In many countries, campaigns were set up in order to spread information, raise funds, and provide the Polish opposition with humanitarian relief and technical assistance. Labor movements especially stepped into the limelight. A number of Western European unions were concerned about the new international tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the new hard-line policy of the US and saw Solidarnosc as a political instrument of clerical and neo-conservative cold warriors. This book analyzes reaction to Solidarnosc in nine Western European countries and within the international trade union confederations. It argues that Western solidarity with Solidarnosc was highly determined by its instrumental value within the national context. Trade unions openly sided with Solidarnosc when they had an interest in doing so, namely when Solidarnosc could strengthen their own program or position. But this book also reveals that reaction in allegedly reluctant countries was massive, albeit discreet, pragmatic, and humanitarian, rather than vocal, emotional, and political.

"A significant contribution that enriches historical narratives. This is a wonderful case study that complicates Latin American history, and particularly labor history in that region, by emphasizing the positive role played by black migrants in labor mobilization in Guatemala."--Jean Muteba Rahier, Florida International University In the late nineteenth century, many Central American governments and countries sought to fill low-paying jobs and develop their economies by recruiting black American and West Indian laborers. Frederick Opie offers a revisionist interpretation of these workers, who were often depicted as simple victims with little, if any, enduring legacy. The Guatemalan government sought to build an extensive railroad system in the 1880s, and actively recruited foreign labor. For poor workers of African descent, immigrating to Guatemala was seen as an opportunity to improve their lives and escape from the racism of the Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean. Using primary and secondary sources as well as ethnographic data, Opie details the struggles of these workers who were ultimately inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey. Regularly suffering class- and race-based attacks and persecution, black laborers frequently met such attacks with resistance. Their leverage--being able to shut down the railroad--was crucially important to the revolutionary movements in 1897 and 1920. Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College, is the author of "Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America," and a blogger at www.foodsasalens.com.

Wild Socialism examines the rise, development, and decline of revolutionary councils of industrial workers in Berlin at the end of the First World War. This popular movement spread throughout Germany, and was without precedent in either the theory or practice of the Social Democratic party and the trade unions allied to it. These workers councils were most highly developed in Berlin, within its particular industrial, political, and cultural milieu. The Berlin Shop Stewards group provided a hard core of militant revolutionaries within the movement, many of whose adherents were more moderate or ambiguous in their views. Externally, the councilists faced a hostile Social Democratic-trade union bureaucracy who characterized council rule as "wilde Sozialismus," a reconstituted and repressive state power, and a revolutionary rival in the rise of German Bolshevism. This work considers the experience of the Berlin councils as alternative institutions outside of traditional union, party, and governmental structures.

"Gauges and measures how railroad labor unions emerged from the World War I experience stronger and more vitally interested in improving their members' lives. Captures how well the railroad unions embarked on a path of reforming retirement systems and social security."--Colin J. Davis, University of Alabama, Birmingham "Makes an interesting argument that the leadership of the railroad unions, primarily the operating crafts, were leaders in the development of labor law and social policy that predates the founding of the CIO."--Mark A. Crouch, labor educator American historians tend to believe that labor activism was moribund in the years between the First World War and the New Deal. Jon Huibregtse challenges this perspective in his examination of the railroad unions of the time, arguing that not only were they active, but that they made a big difference in American Labor practices by helping to set legal precedents. Huibregtse explains how efforts by the Plumb Plan League and the Railroad Labor Executive Association created the Railroad Labor Act, its amendments, and the Railroad Retirement Act. These laws became models for the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, the significant contributions of the railroad laws are, more often than not, overlooked when the NLRA or Social Security are discussed. Offering a new perspective on labor unions in the 1920s, Huibregtse describes how the railroad unions created a model for union activism that workers' organizations followed for the next two decades. Jon R. Huibregtse is professor and chair of the history department at Framingham State University.

In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly relevant case study. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders. We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs. Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.

"Shackel provides a compelling account of how an archaeology of working-class life can correct and enrich historical knowledge and improve public understanding of the American industrial experience."--Dean J. Saitta, University of Denver "A thorough, well-written overview of the issues confronting an archaeology of labor and the contributions historical archaeologists have made in addressing those issues. I would strongly recommend this book for anyone teaching historical archaeology or labor history at the university level."--Stephen A. Mrozowski, University of Massachusetts The winners write history. Thus, it is no surprise that the story of American industrialization is dominated by tales of unbridled technical and social progress. What happens, though, when we take a closer look at the archaeological record? That is the focus of Paul Shackel's new book, which examines labor and working-class life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial America. Shackel offers an overview of a number of ongoing archaeology projects that are focused on reconstructing the capital-labor relations of the past. He demonstrates that worker unrest has been a constant feature of industrialization, as the fight for fair wages and decent working conditions has been a continual one. He shows how workers resisted conditions through sabotage and how new immigrants dealt with daily life in company housing; he even reveals important information about conditions in strike camps.

"Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press" probes the difficult relationship between the press and organized labor in the South from the past to the present day. Written by a veteran journalist and first-hand observer of the labor movement and its treatment in the region's newspapers and other media, the text focuses on the modern South that has evolved since World War II.

In gathering materials for this book, Joseph B. Atkins crisscrossed the region, interviewing workers, managers, labor organizers, immigrants, activists, and journalists, and canvassing labor archives. Using individual events to reveal the broad picture, "Covering for the Bosses" is a personal journey by a textile worker's son who grew up in North Carolina, worked on tobacco farms and in textile plants as a young man, and went on to cover as a reporter many of the developments described in this book.

Atkins details the fall of the once-dominant textile industry and the region's emergence as the "Sunbelt South." He explores the advent of "Detroit South" with the arrival of foreign automakers from Japan, Germany, and South Korea. And finally he relates the effects of the influx of millions of workers from Mexico and elsewhere. "Covering for the Bosses" shows how, with few exceptions, the press has been a key partner in the powerful alliance of business and political interests that keep the South the nation's least-unionized region.

This book is a unique account of trade union and political struggles in the Morris Motors (later British Leyland) car assembly plant in Cowley, where Alan Thornett began work in 1959. He became a shop steward for the lorry drivers, deputy TGWU convener for the plant, and chair of the Joint Shop Stewards Committee and of the TGWU branch. The plant was rarely out of the headlines in the 1960s and 1970s, which was the high point of trade union militancy in Britain in the 20th century. After a successful struggle for unionisation, the Morris plant was by the end of the 1960s amongst the most militant in the industry, averaging over 300 strikes a year. Working conditions were transformed and a vibrant shop floor movement built. The plant was involved in the strikes against In Place of Strife, Harold Wilson's attempt at anti-union laws, and against Heath's Industrial Relations Act, which led to the jailing of the Pentonville Five. This rise of militant trade unionism, however, was bitterly opposed by TGWU officials who worked tirelessly with management to destroy it. The battles this involved, both within the union and in the plant, are vividly described. The book traces how these actions of the trade union establishments reflected institutionalised class compromise, which directly threatened the gains of the 60s and 70s, and which opened the door to the Tory onslaught of the 1980s. It led directly to the betrayal of the NGA by the TUC at Warrington in 1983 and its collapse under Tebbit's anti-union laws. It also led to the isolation and defeat of the miners in 1985, which has been so destructive to the trade union movement, and from which the unions have not even started to recover.

Company town. Blighted community. Beloved home. Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown--La Esmelda, as its residents called it--was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas. Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths the history of this forgotten community. Spanning almost a century, Smeltertown traces the birth, growth, and ultimate demise of a working class community in the largest U.S. city on the Mexican border and places ethnic Mexicans at the center of transnational capitalism and the making of the urban West. Perales shows that Smeltertown was composed of multiple real and imagined social worlds created by the company, the church, the schools, and the residents themselves. Within these dynamic social worlds, residents forged permanence and meaning in the shadow of the smelter's giant smokestacks. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a vibrant community grappling with its own sense of itself and its place in history and collective memory.

Cesar Chavez is the most prominent Latino in United States history books, and much has been written about Chavez and the United Farm Worker's heyday in the 1960s and '70s. But left untold has been their ongoing impact on 21st century social justice movements. "Beyond the Fields" unearths this legacy, and describes how Chavez and the UFW's imprint can be found in the modern reshaping of the American labor movement, the building of Latino political power, the transformation of Los Angeles and California politics, the fight for environmental justice, and the burgeoning national movement for immigrant rights. Many of the ideas, tactics, and strategies that Chavez and the UFW initiated or revived - including the boycott, the fast, clergy-labor partnerships and door-to-door voter outreach - are now so commonplace that their roots in the farmworkers' movement is forgotten. This powerful book also describes how the UFW became the era's leading incubator of young activist talent, creating a generation of skilled alumni who went on to play critical roles in progressive campaigns. UFW volunteers and staff were dedicated to furthering economic justice, and many devoted their post-UFW lives working for social change. When Barack Obama adopted 'Yes We Can' as his 2008 campaign theme, he confirmed that the spirit of 'Si Se Puede' has never been stronger, and that it still provides the clearest roadmap for achieving greater social and economic justice in the United States.

On June 4, 1923, the Bolivian military turned a machine gun on striking miners in the northern Potosi town of Uncia. The incident is remembered as Bolivia's first massacre of industrial workers. The violence in Uncia highlights a formative period in the development of a working class who would eventually challenge the oligarchic control of the nation.

Robert L. Smale begins his study as Bolivia's mining industry transitioned from silver to tin; specifically focusing on the region of Oruro and northern Potosi. The miners were part of a heterogeneous urban class alongside artisans, small merchants, and other laborers. Artisan mutual aid societies provided miners their first organizational models and the guidance to emancipate themselves from the mine owners' political tutelage. During the 1910s both the Workers' Labor Federation and the Socialist Party appeared in Oruro to spur more aggressive political action. In 1920 miners won a comprehensive contract that exceeded labor legislation debated in Congress in the years that followed. Relations between the working class and the government deteriorated soon after, leading to the 1923 massacre in Uncia. Smale ends his study with the onset of the Great Depression and premonitions of war with Paraguay--twin cataclysms that would discredit the old oligarchic order and open new horizons to the labor movement.

This period's developments marked the entry of workers and other marginalized groups into Bolivian politics and the acquisition of new freedoms and basic rights. These events prefigure the rise of Evo Morales--a union activist born in Oruro--in the early twenty-first century.

The U.S. trade union movement finds itself today on a global battlefield filled with landmines and littered with the bodies of various social movements and struggles. Candid, incisive, and accessible, "Solidarity Divided" is a critical examination of labor's current crisis and a plan for a bold new way forward into the twenty-first century. Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, two longtime union insiders whose experiences as activists of color grant them a unique vantage on the problems now facing U.S. labor, offer a remarkable mix of vivid history and probing analysis. They chart changes in U.S. manufacturing, examine the onslaught of globalization, consider the influence of the environment on labor, and provide the first broad analysis of the fallout from the 2000 and 2004 elections on the U.S. labor movement. Ultimately calling for a wide-ranging re-examination of the ideological and structural underpinnings of today's labor movement, this is essential reading for understanding how the battle for social justice can be fought and won.

Of the wave of labor strikes that swept through the South in 1929, the one at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, is perhaps the best remembered. In Gastonia 1929 John Salmond provides the first detailed account of the complex events surrounding the strike at the largest textile mill in the Southeast. His compelling narrative unravels the confusing story of the shooting of the town's police chief, the trials of the alleged killers, the unsolved murder of striker Ella May Wiggins, and the strike leaders' conviction and subsequent flight to the Soviet Union. Describing the intensifying climate of violence in the region, Salmond presents the strike within the context of the southern vigilante tradition and as an important chapter in American economic and labor history in the years after World War I. He draws particular attention to the crucial role played by women as both supporters and leaders of the strike, and he highlights the importance of race and class issues in the unfolding of events.