The Industrial Democracy in Europe project offers a unique opportunity to assess the changes in European industrial relations systems in general, and participation schemes in particular. In 1981 the Industrial Democracy in Europe team (IDE) reported their findings on the extent of industrial democracy in ten European countries during the 1970s. The present volume reports the findings for the subsequent decade. It is particularly useful to have a longitudinal research project that analyses the changes in participation schemes. The research team have looked at ten European countries (including Poland) and also comment on the situation in Israel and Japan. Contributors: B. Wilpert, E. Rosenstein, P. Drenth, R. Peccei, F. Heller, M. Warner

This innovative text grounds the economic analysis of labor markets and employment relationships in a unified theoretical treatment of labor exchange conditions. In addition to providing thorough coverage of standard topics including labor supply and demand, human capital theory, and compensating wage differentials, the text draws on game theory and the economics of information to study the implications of key departures from perfectly competitive labor market conditions. Analytical results are consistently applied to contemporary policy issues and empirical debates. * Provides a coherent theoretical framework for the analysis of labor market phenomena* Features graphical in--chapter analysis supplemented by technical material in appendices* Incorporates numerous end--of--chapter questions that engage the analysis and anticipate subsequent results* Includes innovative chapters on employee compensation methods, market segmentation, income inequality and labor market dynamics* Balances theoretical, empirical and policy analysis

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production. Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains-such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads-generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary group of experts from the fields of labour studies, public health, ergonomics, epidemiology, sociology and law, Sick and Tired examines the inequalities in workplace health and safety. Using an anti-oppressive framework, chapters interrogate a wide range of issues, including links between precarious employment and mental health, the inverse relationship between power and occupational health through the experiences of women, immigrants and older workers, and the need for creative strategies that promote health and safety in ways that support empowerment and equity.

Wit, wisdom, adventure, and revelations from sixty years on the road. They say that only truck drivers experience the true grandeur and landscape of America: the winding mountainsides at sunrise, the first frosts of winter descending on apple orchards, the call of the rising roosters. In A Trucker's Tale, Ed Miller gives an inside look at the allure of the work and the colorful characters who haul our goods on the open road. He shares what it was like to grow up in a boisterous trucking family, his experience as an equipment officer in Vietnam, the wide range of vehicles he's mounted, and the daily trials, tribulations, risks, and exploits that define life as a trucker. Ed's vibrant, no-holds-barred tales are hilarious and heartwarming, sometimes cringeworthy or unbelievable—recollections of heroic feats as well as the “fishing stories� that have stretched and shifted from CB radio to CB radio. Many are the results of what he calls “just plain stupidity.� Others bring to light the small acts of kindness and grand gestures that these Knights of the Highway perform each day, as well as the safety risks and continual danger that these essential workers endure. Together they paint a compelling portrait of one of the most important but least-known industries and reveal why Ed, and so many like him, just kept on truckin’.

This collection of articles and cases helps readers develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes that human resource and other managers need for success when working in culturally diverse environments. Three key questions are addressed:
What are the trends and current issues in global diversity that affect management and human resource management?
What are the solutions?
What is needed to implement these solutions?

Articles from a range of different cultures have been specially chosen for their readability and for their practical application. Cases at the end of each section provide real life examples of successes and problems from a variety of countries, highlighting national differences and challenging students to provide solutions to real life issues.

With a detailed introduction setting the scene for the readings and cases, "International HRM: Managing Diversity in the Workplace" is ideal for students on MBA and executive courses in international human resource management and cultural diversity.

In this definitive guide, Forrest Mosten--an internationally recognized mediation expert--helps would-be mediators answer the critical question "Do I have the values, skills, personality, and commitment necessary to mediate?"
A comprehensive resource, the book also explores a wealth of timely topics including the need to establish standards of the profession, how to maintain confidentiality, the pros and cons of co-mediation, and the place of mediation in the process of court and law reform. Straightforward and reader-friendly, the Mediation Career Guide is filled with practice tips, self-surveys, diagrams, reading resources, a list of training programs and volunteer opportunities, budget forms, and model standards of conduct. This hands-on resource is designed to make the challenging journey of becoming a peacemaker a one-step-at-a-time manageable process.

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.

Using Hamilton's local history to tell the wider story of the North American working-class, Lunch-Bucket Lives investigates how workers dealt with the profound changes in their lives between the 1890s and the 1930s, as wage-earners, family members, and participants in various social networks. Heron takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods?settlement patterns and housing, marriage, child care, domestic labour, public health, schooling, charity and social work, popular culture, gender identities, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and politics in various forms?presenting a comprehensive view of working-class life in the first half of the twentieth century. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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.

In 1991, Columbia University's one thousand clerical workers launched a successful campaign for justice in their workplace. This diverse union -- two-thirds black and Latina, three-fourths women -- was committed to creating an inclusive movement organization and to fighting for all kinds of justice. How could they address the many race and gender injustices members faced, avoid schism, and maintain the unity needed to win? Sharon Kurtz, an experienced union activist and former clerical worker herself, was welcomed into the union and pursued these questions. Using this case study and secondary studies of sister clerical unions at Yale and Harvard, she examines the challenges and potential of identity politics in labor movements.

With the Columbia strike as a point of departure, Kurtz argues that identity politics are valuable for mobilizing groups, but often exclude members and their experiences of oppression. However, Kurtz believes that identity politics should not be abandoned as a component in building movements, but should be reframed -- as multi-identity politics. In the end she shows an approach to organizing with great potential impact not only for labor unions but for any social movement.

"Changing Industrial Relations in Europe" is the second edition of the influential and widely used textbook, "Industrial Relations in the New Europe." As with the earlier edition, the book will be a definitive text and reference for all students in industrial relations and human resource management looking at international issues.

For the new book an outstanding team of international experts has produced a completely updated and reworked analysis of industrial relations in the fifteen European Union states and the two other major European countries. The book's unrivaled breadth and depth provides:
The latest thinking on current industrial relations trends and controversies within the broader context of internationalization, European integration, and the moves toward monetary union.
A basic description of the institutions and actors in each country.
A strong focus in each contribution on analysing in a clear, readable and accessible manner the underlying dynamic of the industrial relations system in question, and the emerging trends for the 1990s.
A wide-ranging introduction from the editors that contributes to current debates in comparative industrial relations analysis.
The views of leading local experts on each of the countries covered.

The sheer diversity of approaches to the employment relationship in the countries of Europe is both confirmed and made accessible to analysis in this unique text which will be an indispensable resource and reference to all students and scholars in the field.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. As the Upper Peninsula's mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls' income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor.

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.

High technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. This grim prediction was first published in the 1994 edition of The Jobless Future, an eerily accurate title that could have been written for today's dismal economic climate. Fully updated and with a new introduction by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future warns that jobs as we know them-long-term, with benefits-are an endangered species.

Economists generally assume that wage differentials among similar workers will only endure when competition in the capital and/or labour market is restricted. However, using a classical Marxist analysis of real capitalist competition, Botwinick shows that substantial patterns of wage disparity can persist despite high levels of competition. Going against mainstream proponents of labour-management cooperation, the author calls for militant union organization that can once again take wages and working conditions out of capitalist competition.

Progressive theorists and activists insist that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed from a normative point of view. However, most accept the liberal egalitarian thesis that the serious shortcomings of market societies could be overcome with proper political regulation. Building on Marx's legacy, Tony Smith argues that advocates of this thesis lack an adequate concept of capital and the state, and fail to comprehend new developments in world history ensuring that the 'destructive' aspects of capitalism increasingly outweigh whatever 'creative' elements it might continue to possess.

Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith 's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.

Comprising five thematic sections, this volume provides a critical, international and interdisciplinary exploration of employment relations. It examines the major subjects and emerging areas within the field, including essays on institutional theory, voice, new actors, precarious work and employment. Led by a well-respected team of editors, the contributors examine current knowledge and debates within each topic, offering cutting-edge analysis and reflection. The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations is an extensive reference work that offers students and researchers an introduction to current scholarship in the longstanding discipline of employment relations. It will be an essential addition to library collections in business and management, law, economics, sociology and political economy.