This book, originally published in 1999, provided the first comparative, in-depth analysis of workplace relations in east and west Germany. The collapse of communism and the ensuing process of reform means that East Germany provides a particularly interesting case, having experienced rapid and radical political and economic transformation, and representing an historically outstanding experiment of the shifting of an entire social system onto a different society. This book examines the success of the institutional transfer of west German labour organisations into east Germany workplaces and addresses central questions such as : Can capitalist labour institutions be imposed on a former communist workforce? What conditions determine the success or failure of these institutions? Can 'social partnership/ between capital and labour be learned?

Rethinking the American Labor Movement tells the story of the various groups and incidents that make up what we think of as the "labor movement." While the efforts of the American labor force towards greater wealth parity have been rife with contention, the struggle has embraced a broad vision of a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth and a desire for workers to have greater control over their own lives. In this succinct and authoritative volume, Elizabeth Faue reconsiders the varied strains of the labor movement, situating them within the context of rapidly transforming twentieth-century American society to show how these efforts have formed a political and social movement that has shaped the trajectory of American life. Rethinking the American Labor Movement is indispensable reading for scholars and students interested in American labor in the twentieth century and in the interplay between labor, wealth, and power.

This book showcases the inequalities experienced between the Global North and the Global South by exploring the production and distribution model of goods and services worldwide through an analysis of why the structure, framework, and interconnectedness of global supply chains increases the persistence of worker rights' violations. The narrative explains the power relationships between multinational corporations, their subcontractors, governments, non-governmental organizations, labor unions, and workers. The text focuses primarily on competition between workers in the Global South and the Global North who are compelled to work in global supply chains for their survival and takes a macro-look at how global supply chains operate, how they are governed, who invests and why, and who wins and who loses. From the workers' perspective, the text highlights the millions of low-wage workers who suffer exploitation and abuse at the hands of greedy multi-national corporations who are able to distance themselves from any liability for workers' welfare through an institutional system created by national/state governments, trade agreements, and tax and investment strategies which protect property rights over workers' rights. The fragile plight of workers crescendos through examples of exploitation and abuse in the fishing, mining, apparel, electronic and manufacturing industries, focusing events of workplace disasters, and slave-like working conditions, then climaxes by providing strategies to help strengthen workers through legislative and policy initiatives, collective action, and social and public pressure.

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.

Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives. In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

Affirmative action is still a reality of the American workplace. How is it that such a controversial Federal program has managed to endure for more than five decades? Inside Affirmative Action addresses this question. Beyond the usual ideological debate and discussions about the effects of affirmative action for either good or ill upon issues of race and gender in employment, this book recounts and analyzes interviews with people who worked in the program within the government including political appointees. The interviews and their historical context provide understanding and insight into the policies and politics of affirmative action and its role in advancing civil rights in America. Recent books published on affirmative action address university admissions, but very few of them ever mention Executive Order 11246 or its enforcement by an agency within the Department of Labor - let alone discuss in depth the profound workplace diversity it has created or the employment opportunities it has generated. This book charts that history through the eyes of those who experienced it. Inside Affirmative Action will be of interest to those who study American race relations, policy, history and law.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Drawing from the EU-funded DomEQUAL research project across 9 countries in Europe, South America and Asia, this comparative study explores the conditions of domestic workers around the world and the campaigns they are conducting to improve their labour rights. The book showcases how domestic workers' movements put 'intersectionality in action' in representing the interest of various marginalized social groups from migrants and low-income groups to racialized and rural girls and women. Casting light on issues such as subjectification, and collective organizing on the part of a category of workers conventionally regarded as unorganizable, this ambitious volume will be invaluable for scholars, policy makers and activists alike.

For too long, cooperatives have been considered marginal players in the global economy, and as unrealistic venues for the aspirations of new and experienced members of the labour force. This marginalization shows in business, municipal and legal discussions, and curricula, where cooperative structures are rarely mentioned, let alone presented as viable options. Cooperatives at Work presents a range of success stories in employee ownership and worker owned-and-governed cooperatives. The authors further show how such firms embody important and highly contested ideals of democracy, shared equity, and social transformation. Throughout this volume, the authors present a range of practical lessons, strategies, and resources based on their pioneering, international research. This latest volume in The Future of Work series has a strong ethical stream, consistent with yearnings for more inspired forms of business revealed in many public opinion polls. The book is future-oriented, using contemporary as well as historical examples to teach lessons that are not necessarily time-bound. It is essential for anyone seeking a window onto the future of cooperative entrepreneurial practice and grassroots democracy.

Much of the received wisdom about the world of work emphasizes the marketization of the employment relationship; the decline of class-based forms of inequality, and the individualization of employment relations. Non-standard forms of employment, the delayering of organizational hierarchies, and the use of individual performance-based payment systems are all held up as examples of a new neo-liberal order in which employers and employees no longer feel a sense of obligation to each other.
Drawing on a range of employee and employer surveys, including the authors own Working in Britain 2000 survey, this ambitious study presents a comprehensive examination of the conditions, attitudes, and experiences of British employees from the mid-1980s to the early years of this century. The authors' analyses provides a compelling critique of the received wisdom, while also providing an original, alternative account of recent developments in work and labour markets. Along the way, the book covers such topical issues as the changing nature of trade union membership, the consequences of Britain's 'long hours' culture', and the apparent inability of women to ask for pay rises. Significantly, the authors seek to reposition debates about the future of work by restoring the concepts of contracts and social class to the analysis of the employment relationship.
Based on the ESRC funded Future of Work research programme this book is destined to shape our understanding of employment in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Taking as its starting point the authors' earlier work on Labour Legislation and Public Policy, this book provides a detailed account and critical analysis of British labour legislation and labour market regulation since the early 1990s. Referring back to the earlier history, and filling in the gaps in the early and mid-1990s, the work concentrates mainly on the legislation and policy measures in the employment sphere of the New Labour governments which have been in power since 1997, placing those developments in the context of the relevant aspects of European Community law. The work argues for an understanding of this body of legislation and regulatory activity as being directed towards the realisation of a flexible labour market, and shows how this objective has been pursued in three intersecting areas, those of regulating personal or individual employment relations, regulating collective representation, and promoting work. It explores the methods of regulation which have been used, developing a taxonomy of regulation and a notion of 'light regulation' to characterise some recent legislative interventions. It considers how far the administration of Prime Minister Tony Blair has fulfilled its promises or claims of 'fairness at work', 'welfare to work' and 'success at work'. It is intended to be of interest to those concerned with the study of British and European labour or employment law, employee relations or human resource management, labour market economics, and contemporary politics.

This book compares sources of worker and employer power in Germany, South Africa, and the United States in order to identify the sources of comparative U.S. decline in union power and to more precisely analyze the nature of labor-movement power. It finds that this power is not confined to allied parties, union confederations, or strikes, but rather consists of the capacity to autonomously translate power from one context to the next. By combining their product, labor market, and labor law advantages through their dominant employers' associations, leading firms are able to impose constraints on labor's free collective bargaining regionally and nationally, defeating employer interests that are more amenable to labor in the process. Through an examination of these patterns of interest organization, the book shows, however, that initial employer advantages prove to be contingent and unstable and that employers are forced to cede to more far-reaching demands of increasingly organized workers.

In Co-operative Struggles, Denise Kasparian expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualize conflicts in the new worker co-operativism of the twenty-first century.After the depletion of neoliberal reforms at the dawn of the twenty-first century in Argentina, co-operativism gained momentum, mainly due to the recuperation of enterprises by their workers and state promotion of co-operatives through social policies. These new co-operatives became actors not just in production but in social struggle. Their peculiarity lies in the fact that they shape a socio-productive form not structured by wage relations: workers are at the same time owners of the firms. Why, how, and by what cleavages and groupings do these co-operative workers without bosses come into conflict?

Art has always played a significant role in the history of the labour movement. Songs, stories, poems, pamphlets, and comics, have inspired workers to take action against greedy bosses and helped shape ideas of a more equal world. They also help fan the flames of discontent. Radical social change doesn't come without radical art. It would be impossible to think about labour unrest without its iconic songs like "Solidarity Forever" or its cartoons like Ernest Riebe's creation, Mr. Block. In this vein, The Graphic History Collective has created an illustrated chronicle of the strike--the organized withdrawal of labour power--in Canada. For centuries, workers in Canada--Indigenous and non-Indigenous, union and non-union, men and women--have used the strike as a powerful tool, not just for better wages, but also for growing working-class power. This lively comic book will inspire new generations to learn more about labour and working-class history and the power of solidarity.

Since the 1980s, the world's governments have decreased state welfare and thus increased the number of unprotected 'informal' or 'precarious' workers. As a result, more and more workers do not receive secure wages or benefits from either employers or the state. This book offers a fresh and provocative look into the alternative social movements informal workers in India are launching. It also offers a unique analysis of the conditions under which these movements succeed or fail. Drawing from 300 interviews with informal workers, government officials and union leaders, Rina Agarwala argues that Indian informal workers are using their power as voters to demand welfare benefits from the state, rather than demanding traditional work benefits from employers. In addition, they are organizing at the neighborhood level, rather than the shop floor, and appealing to 'citizenship', rather than labor rights.

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.

How are national and international labour laws responding to the challenge of globalization as it re-shapes the workplaces of the world? This collection of essays by leading legal scholars and lawyers from Europe and the Americas was first published in 2006. It addresses the implications of globalization for the legal regulation of the workplace. It examines the role of international labour standards and the contribution of the International Labour Organization, and assesses the success of the European experiment with continental employment standards. It explores the prospects for hemispheric co-operation on labour standards in the Americas, and deals with the impact of international labour standards on the rights of women and migrant workers. As the nature and organization of work around the world is being decisively transformed, new regional and international institutions are emerging that may provide the platform for new labour standards, and for protecting existing ones.

For up to twenty years after the Second World War both in Britain and the US boasted `mature' industrial relations systems supported by their governments and, allowing for some differences in degree, by most employers. Since the early 1980s, these systems have been critically weakened. This comparative industrial relations text explains this development primarily through the withdrawal of public policy support and, mainly in Britain's case, its replacement by government hostility. An important consequence of this is the erosion of the effective defence and representation of employee interests as the managerial prerogative has been allowed, even encouraged, to extend its authority in the workplace. The `representation gap' has grown so that six out of seven US employees, and two out of three British, are not represented at work, at the same time as there has been increasing discussion of `team' working etc. This could be a serious negative development for economic performance. A growing body of research is indicating that employers who bargain with trade unions, or enter into partnerships with them, are likely to be more productive than their non-union competitors. More importantly, the size of the representation gap presents a clear denial of the democratic rights of citizens, in their role as employees, with potentially serious implications for social stability both within and beyond the workplace.

The Class Strikes Back examines a number of radical, twenty-first-century workers' struggles. These struggles are characterised by a different kind of unionism and solidarity, arising out of new kinds of labour conditions and responsive to new kinds of social and economic marginalisation. The essays in the collection demonstrate the dramatic growth of syndicalist and autonomist formations and argue for their historical necessity. They show how workers seek to form and join democratic and independent unions that are fundamentally opposed to bureaucratic leadership, compromise, and concessions

Global labour history is a latecomer to historical science. It has only developed in the last three decades. This anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art

Cooperativism and Democracy, edited by Bartlomiej Blesznowski is not purely a scientific book, but rather a guide which shows how scholars and activists wrote about the community, social participation and politics in Poland in the early 20th century. The book contains a selection of texts in socio-political thought, led by the work of one of the most important Polish thinkers - Edward Abramowski, socialist, philosopher and psychologist.