The behaviour of US productivity since this book was originally publishedin 1994, has added new relevance to the relationship between profits and productivity. In the long run, productivity growth determines the economic standard of living. This book is divided into three parts: the basis of the first is the empirical finding that, controlling for normal business cycle effects, productivity grows faster when profits have been low than otherwise. The second part discusses how to measure marginal cost using time series data and the third tests a basic assumption that productivity growth is exogenous to labour and capital.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Originally published in 1989, this book analyses the economic and political position of the small firm in the 1980s, and in particular the relationship between small and large firms in an advanced capitalist economy. Focusing on the printing and clothing industries, it examines the industrial relation practices in these two contrasting sectors and shows that apparent industrial relations harmony - for example, the lack of strikes - should be put down to the powerlessness of the workforce rather than to contentment.

The German Social Democratic Party was the world's first million-strong political party and was the main force pushing for the democratisation of Imperial Germany before the First World War. This book examines the themes around which the party organized its mainly working-class membership, and analyses the experiences and outlook of rank-and-file party members as well as the party's press and publications. Key topics of inquiry include: the Lassalle cult and leadership, nationalism and internationalism, attitudes to work, the politics of subsistence, the effects of military service, reading and the diffusion of Marx's ideas, cultural organisations, and socialism and republicanism under the Imperial German state. Through these various avenues, Bonnell explores the remarkable degree to which the party successfully addressed workers' everyday concerns while also offering the prospect of a better future.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Overtime is about the politics of time, and specifically the amount of time that we spend labouring within capitalist society. It argues that reactivating the longstanding demand for shorter working hours should be central to any progressive trajectory in the years ahead. This book explains what a shorter working week means, as well as its history and its political implications. Will Stronge and Kyle Lewis examine the idea of reducing the time we all spend labouring for other on both a theoretical and political level, and offer an analysis rooted in the radical traditions from which the idea first emerged. Throughout, the reader is introduced to key theorists of work and working time alongside the relevant research regarding our contemporary 'crisis of work', to which the authors' proposal of a shorter working week responds.

Modern capitalism and political freedom rest on concepts of conscience and morality, and abhor concentrations of unbridled power. In America, that economic and political system developed mechanisms designed to check and balance such power. Despite those mechanisms, corporate America developed too many imperial chief executives who abused their power by engaging in a fraudulent and self-serving pursuit of wealth and perquisites. This edition deals with how this happened, how the system responded, and actions that could minimize the danger of its recurrence. The text analyzes those who either support or keep quiet for miscreant chief executives, and how these participants became involved in corporate fraud. The investigation is completed by a look at the results of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the law enacted as the corrective response to corporate corruption, and the increasingly intense pressure to ease the expense and other burdens associated with its vigorous enforcement. Hopefully, the insights gained by the analysis will contribute to a revived confidence in the integrity of corporate accounts, and thereby sustain the vitality of America's capital markets, which are essential to our future economic well-being.

Vicente Lombardo Toledano was the founder of numerous labour union organisations in Mexico and Latin America between the 1920s and the 1960s. He was not only an organiser but also a broker between the unions, the government, and business leaders—an almost singular figure able to disentangle difficult, seemingly irreconcilable conflicts. He cooperated closely with the governments of Mexico and other Latin American nations and worked with the representatives of the Soviet Union when he considered it useful. This willingness to work across ideological divides meant that he was alternately seen as a government stooge or a communist, even though he was never a member of the Communist Party nor of any Mexican government administration. Daniela Spenser's rousing new biography of Lombardo Toledano is the first to be based on his extensive private papers. In addition to this unprecedented access, Spenser also draws on primary sources from European, Mexican and American archives, and on extensive personal interviews. Her even-keeled portrayal of the man counters both previous hagiographies and vilifications that have come before it.

This volume seeks to re-energise the paradigm of the New International Labour Studies by detailing how struggles over the construction, reproduction, utilisation and restructuring of labour forces are the contested social foundations upon which the global economy stands. Through a combination of theoretical works and a series of case studies, the volume highlights the cutting edge of international labour studies. Its expands on three pivotal areas of study within the discipline:1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within non-traditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to help address the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour. In addressing these themes, the volume helps explain not only how the contemporary international division of labour is produced and reproduced, but also the strengths and limits to current attempts to overcome its unequal and divisive nature. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

This book gives a comprehensive survey of the field of Industrial Relations, focusing on general principles and problems. Illustrations are drawn from the practices adopted in many parts of the world such as Australia, France, Germany and the USA. Contents include chapters on the following: * Personnel Management * Training * Methods of Wage Payment * Job Evaluation * Profit-Sharing and Co-partnership * Trade Unionism * Employers' Organizations * Collective Bargaining * Wage Bases * Equal Opportunities * Conciliation and Arbitration

During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600-1850, workers of all kinds-slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors-repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order-from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.

Drawing from experience internationally, on recent and important developments in regulatory theory, and upon models and approaches constructed during the author's empirical research, this book addresses the question: how can law influence the internal self-regulation of organisations in order to make them more responsive to occupational health and safety concerns? In this context, it is argued that Occupational Health and Safety management systems have the potential to stimulate models of self-organisation within firms in such a way as to make them self-reflective and to encourage informal self-critical reflection about their occupational health and safety performance. This book argues for a two track system of regulation under which enterprises are offered a choice between a continuation of traditional forms of regulation and the adoption of a safety management system-based approach on the other. The book concludes with a discussion of the use of criminal and administrative sanctions to provide organisations with incentives to adopt effective Occupational Health and Safety management systems. The book proposes a wider range of criminal sanctions and sentencing guidelines to ensure employers receive sentencing discounts where they have introduced effective management systems.

A commonplace assumption about American workers is that they lack class consciousness. This perception has baffled social scientists, demoralized activists, and generated a significant literature on American exceptionalism. In this provocative book, a young sociologist takes the prevailing assumptions to task and sheds new light upon this very important issue. In three vivid case studies Fantasia explores the complicated, multi-faceted dynamics of American working-class consciousness and collective action.

A recurring theme in the history of modern Britain in the twentieth-century has been the failure of its manufacturing industry and the record of disorder and conflict in the industrial workplace. This image was reinforced by the evidence of national strikes from the 1960s until 1984. This emphasis on decline and disorder in British manufacturing has distorted our understanding of workplace relationships and cultures in the post-war years. This volume provides a fresh assessment of the diverse and complex world of the workplace and Britain's production cultures during the long boom. Essays investigate the public and private sectors, and both manufacturing and service industries. The volume begins with a comparison of labour management in the post-war automobile industry, exploring the role of the foreman in the management of shop floor labour in Britain and the USA. The following two essays are concerned with relations between management and workers in the publicly-owned corporations. The first examines negotiations over pay and effort at the Swindon locomotive works, including the cultural values which informed the behaviour of the bargainers. The second investigates managerial responses to technical change in the British gas industry. We then move into the service sector, with an essay on the management of clerical staff in banks, including a discussion of the different roles available to male and female workers, and the incorporation of automated technologies. The final essay looks at the involvement of the unions in workplace productivity and the extent to which Labour politics informed union behaviour. The essays in this volume shed new light on the reasons for Britain's economic performance and opens up earlier interpretations of national decline and adversarial workplace cultures for further debate.

This edited collection provides an understanding of the range of learning that is enabled by trade unions, and the agendas around that learning. It comes at an important time as, in the UK, recent years have seen significant new opportunities for unions' involvement in the government's learning and skills policy. At the same time, trade unions have had to cope with declining membership and changing employment patterns, and thus have a keen interest in defining their role in contemporary employment relations and in pursuing strategies for union renewal. Therefore, in order to explore these dynamics, a strong feature of the book is its drawing together of informed, research-based contributions from the fields of training, skills and education, and of industrial relations. International and historical perspectives are included in order to better understand the contemporary issues. There are important conclusions for policy-makers, practitioners and researchers.

Since its inception, Development Studies has tended to restrict its critical enquiries to nations in the 'Third World.' The field's important studies of labour markets, who circulates within them, and the controversies such issues generate, have hitherto been confined 'lesser developed' societies. In this important collection, drawing from key texts over the course Tom Brass's career, these concerns are deftly deployed to examine how these same phenomena affect metropolitan capitalist countries.

"A profound exploration into the decline of factory labor in the U.S. . . . Hers is one of those rare books that brilliantly illuminates current transformations in the organization of work and work lives."--Fred Block, author of "Postindustrial Possibilities

"Part ethnography and part contemporary labor history, Milkman's wonderful book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the transformation American industry has undergone in the past twenty years and what this transformation has meant for American workers."--David Brody, author of "Workers in Industrial America

"Behind all of the statistics on downsizing, the shrinking of our industrial base, and the folly of short-sighted management is the human drama of working women and men and their unions, struggling for dignity, fairness, and security. In "Farewell to the Factory, Ruth Milkman tells us the stories of workers in a New Jersey auto plant. Milkman's scholarship makes a valuable contribution to the national conversation on restoring the American Dream for working families."--John J. Sweeney, President, AFL-CIO

"A fascinating case study of deindustrialization and restructuring by one of the leading social historians of the auto industry. The book is a great read and should be widely adopted in the classroom."--Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley

"Milkman's impressive study probes the contemporary meaning of work, freedom and dignity in a fashion both sociologically rigorous and culturally evocative. Avoiding liberal nostalgia over the demise of industial America, Milkman deploys a magnificantly textured set of interviews to demonstrate that auto workers hated the chronic stress and humiliation offactory work even as they clung to its high pay and good benefits."--Nelson Lichtenstein, author of "The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor

Exploring Employee Relations is a straightforward and accessible text that is aimed at students who are taking the subject for the first time. The structure is clear and logical, leading the newcomer through the topics in a way to maximise comprehension. Key issues are highlighted and supported by a small case or example from business. Chapters are structured to enable progressive learning with a logical development of the content. Each chapter ends with a summary of the key points met in the text and these are further reinforced by review and discussion questions, with answers and feedback on the activities included at the end of the book. The chapters are grouped thematically into parts and longer case studies are included that are suitable for assignment and seminar work. The text has also been written to cover the new CIPD employee relations syllabus.Its features include: a clear introductory text covering the CIPD Employee Relations syllabus; revised and updated throughout with new material on the European Union, the role and impact of government and demography, bargaining power and ways of securing employee commitment; and a student friendly resource providing self check activities, mini case studies and Question and Answer sections.

Japan's national identity associates the 'Japanese people' with the Japanese land, making the farmer the backbone of the nation. Others in Japanese Agriculture challenges this mythology, revealing the changing faces of Japanese farmers during the colonial and post-war eras. First, it traces the tangled trail of Koreans brought into farming villages as a result of war mobilization and capitalist development. Second, it discusses the plight of those who evacuated from cities as they attempted to eke out a living on marginal land. Third, it points out that settlers repatriated from the colonies were met with hostility from villagers and indifference from authorities. Finally, it explores how those who were encouraged to emigrate for 'the good of the nation' in post-war Japan, found themselves victims of agrarian reforms, which severed their ties. In sum, despite being lauded as the 'backbone of the nation' Japanese farmers have been repeatedly marginalized and othered.

Professor Rojot's work links the theory of negotiation to its more practical aspects and bridges the gap between theoretical work and 'how to' manuals. The theoretical analysis is rooted in the field of sociology in general and in the strategic analysis of organisations in particular. This sets it apart from most treatises on negotiation which tend to be based on social-psychology, political science or economics.

Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn't always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States. The Big Rig explains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how labor is recruited, trained, and used in the industry. He then shows how inexperienced workers are convinced to lease a truck and to work as independent contractors. He explains how deregulation and collective action by employers transformed trucking's labor markets - once dominated by the largest and most powerful union in US history - into an important example of the costs of contemporary labor markets for workers and the general public.

Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting work and workers in the Global South. Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality studies, it explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalisation can be harnessed for counter mobilisation by the new worker.