The book provides a comprehensive, comparative treatment of the development of New Investment Funds (NIFs)-private equity, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds-and their impact upon labour and employment. Several countries are selected for in-depth treatment with a chapter devoted to each: US, UK, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and Japan. The book examines variations in the level and type of fund activity between countries, considers influences upon these variations, and analyses differences in the impact of these funds on labour and employment. This analysis is located in a broader discussion of the nature and development of corporate financialization and comparative capitalism. Financialization has supported the development and growth of these funds, and many aspects of these funds exemplify the process of financialization. Each chapter reports the evidence on the impact of these funds on labour and employment. Case studies conducted by the authors supplement other evidence. Much of the evidence shows that private equity funds can have adverse effects on labour, such as reductions in employment, but there is also evidence of more positive effects in some cases such as employment growth and adoption of high commitment human resource practices. There is much less evidence on the effects of activist HFs and SWFs, with the impact on labour typically being indirect. Between them, the chapters show that variations in national regulation have a significant impact on both the development of fund activities and their effects. With regard to labour effects, employment and labour regulations do not seem to be of prime importance in explaining the level of fund activity, but regulation supporting worker consultation and voice affects the capacity of labour representatives to influence the outcomes of fund activity on labour and employment.

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.

Over the last fifteen years, the deregulation of Britain's labor market has led to economic growth, employment opportunities, and a more diverse workforce: the "fat years." However, now as Britain faces its lean years with job cuts, rising unemployment, income insecurity, and related social strains, how can and should the government and key labor market policy makers ensure the labor market provides job opportunities and reasonable levels of social justice?
The fundamental changes that have occurred in labor market institutions mean that 'solutions' of previous decades no longer work. This volume sets out to address the major challenges faced:
- Unemployment, immigration, housing and job subsidies
- Key institutional changes, such as the decline of collective regulation, rise of occupational licensing, and the National Minimum Wage
- Pay and subsidies in the private and public sector
Contributions from leading experts in the field employ the latest theory and empirical research to examine a different set of problems and the policies that could help to resolve them.

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?

Throughout the industrial world, the discipline of labour law has fallen into deep philosophical and policy crisis, at the same time as new theoretical approaches make it a field of considerable intellectual ferment. Modern labour law evolved in a symbiotic relationship with a postwar institutional and policy agenda, the social, economic, and political underpinnings of which have gradually eroded in the context of accelerating international economic integration and wage-competition, a decline in the capacity of the nation-state to steer economic progress, the ascendancy of fiscal austerity and monetarism over Keynesian/welfare state politics, the appearance of post-industrial production models, the proliferation of contingent employment relationships, the fragmentation of class-based identities and emergence of new social movements, and the significantly increased participation of women in paid work. These developments offer many appealing possibilities - the opportunity, for example, to contest the gender division of labour and re-think the boundaries between immigration and labour policy. But they also hold out quite threatening prospects - including increased unemployment and inequality and the decline of workers' organizations and social participation - in the context of proliferating constraints imposed by international financial pressures on enacting redistributive social and economic policies. New strategies must be developed to meet these challenges. These essays - which are the product of a transnational comparative dialogue among academics and practitioners in labour law and related legal fields, including social security, immigration, trade, and development - identify, analyse, and respond to some of the conceptual and policy challenges posed by globalization.

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.

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.

Through a detailed examination of the German coal industry, Martin Parnell illustrates the historical evolution of the practice of industrial self-government and argues that historical continuities lie at the root of a full understanding of German capitalism. His study, which takes us from the eighteenth century to the present day, examines how intensive cooperation between state, management, private sector, and unions has shaped the industry both in growth and decline. He argues that it is Germany's strong tradition of industrial self-government that is the key institution characterizing the organization and functioning of the German political economy, uniting the politics of the dominant state role and the economics of industrial production. Parnell uses and develops the ideas of German economic historians, especially Abelshauser, whose influential work on the nineteenth-century origins of capitalist organization have recently begun to have a wide impact in translation. His work is a valuable contribution to the debate about the origins, forms, and future of German neo-corporatism.

From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers? This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations. Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires. This is an innovative book that offers a complete view of the new labour conflicts in the platform economy.

This book analyzes how the Second International reacted to international diplomatic crises and what was the attitude of French, German and Italian socialists between 1889 and 1915, the year in which Italy entered the World War. This book shows that the Second International became over the years more and more involved in the fight against war and learnt to respond to situations of diplomatic crisis. An example of this is the fact that its last congress before the outbreak of the First World War, the Basel Congress of 1912, was nothing less than a great international socialist demonstration of opposition to war. However, the fact that France, Germany or Italy were involved in a diplomatic crisis hindered the International's ability to respond effectively to it. For all these factors, the attitude of the International is very different from one crisis to another.

Recasting labor studies in a long-term and global framework, the book draws on a major new database on world labor unrest to show how local labor movements have been related to world-scale political, economic, and social processes since the late nineteenth century. Through an in-depth empirical analysis of select global industries, the book demonstrates how the main locations of labor unrest have shifted from country to country together with shifts in the geographical location of production. It shows how the main sites of labor unrest have shifted over time together with the rise or decline of new leading sectors of capitalist development and demonstrates that labor movements have been deeply embedded (as both cause and effect) in world political dynamics. Over the history of the modern labor movement, the book isolates what is truly novel about the contemporary global crisis of labor movements. Arguing against the view that this is a terminal crisis, the book concludes by exploring the likely forms that emergent labor movements will take in the twenty-first century.

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.

Bajo el gobierno del MAS el movimiento indigena boliviano logro emanciparse politicamente, penetrando las estructuras del poder estatal, pero al mismo tiempo paso por su crisis, desmovilizandose paulatinamente. El objetivo del libro es explorar la relacion entre la institucionalizacion del movimiento y su siguiente desmovilizacion. Aplicando el metodo "process tracing", el libro infiere primero que el impacto de la institucionalizacion en la dinamica del movimiento es condicionado por su caracter, asi el movimiento se pacifica cuando goza de la politica favorable y representacion gubernamental mas bien que parlamentaria; segundo, una vez el movimiento sea la parte de la maquinaria estatal, su disidencia potencial causa dilemas estrategicos para el gobierno que reacciona con estrategias para suprimirlo.

In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress. This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.

Far from witnessing the beginning of the end of organized labour as a major political force, Rethinking Global Labour argues that, post-financial crisis, we are entering a new era for workers and their organizations in which they will begin to impact decisively on the new global order. In exploring the potential futures for the world's workers, the book provides an insightful account of how globalization has created a new global working class while increasing the insecurity and precarious nature of most employment. Moving beyond categories of North and South, Munck argues that the new global class of workers will be central both to the future of globalization and to its possible alternatives. In some ways the book poses a "return to the future" drawing parallels with the birth of the labour and democratic movements before the consolidation of nation states. At a time of growing unease with the negative effects of economic globalization, Rethinking Global Labour offers an important assessment of global labour and its potential for organization.