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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Industrial relations & safety > Industrial relations > General
With the globalization and growth of world economic markets, the
importance of a strong workforce has become paramount to business
success. Organizations cannot achieve this global reach unless they
intend to tackle issues regarding equality in the workplace. In a
time when sustainability and corporate responsibility have become
the norm, organizations value the creation of an egalitarian
workplace. Macro and Micro-Level Issues Surrounding Women in the
Workforce: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical
scholarly resource that voices issues and challenges faced by women
and provides guidance for organizations in developing strategic
initiatives to involve women in decision-making processes and
improve women's wellbeing in the workplace. The book explores macro
(socio-economic) and micro-level (organizational) issues in
relation to women's positions at work including occupational
segregation, gender pay gap, diversity management, and
socio-cultural roles attached to women. It is essential for
executives, managers, executive board members, human resources
professionals, policymakers, business practitioners, academicians,
researchers, corporate professionals, and students.
Anton Pannekoek discusses the viability of workers' councils as an
effective means of administrating a socialist society, as
contrasted to the centralized doctrines of state communism or state
capitalism. Conceived as an alternative way to establish and
sustain socialism, the workers councils have so far never been
successfully established at a national scale. Part of the problem
was disagreements among revolutionaries about their size and
responsibilities; while Lenin supported the notion during the
revolutionary period, the councils were phased out in favor of a
centralized state, rather than diffused through the strata of
society. Pannekoek draws on history for his ideas, noting the
deficiencies of previous revolutions and the major objectives a
future revolution should hold. The various tasks a state of
worker's councils must accomplish, and the enemies that must be
overcome - notably fascists, bourgeois elements and big business -
are listed.
How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue
for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A
2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner's Workers without Borders,
about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and
construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a
country with such strong employers' associations and trade unions
allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious
labor market segment? Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the
puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She
interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary
European labour markets and the implications of and regulations for
this position in industrial relations, social policy and justice in
Europe. Workers without Borders concentrates on how local actors
implement European rules and opportunities to analyze the balance
of power induced by the EU around policy issues. Wagner examines
the particularities of posted worker dynamics at the workplace
level, in German meatpacking facilities and on construction sites,
to reveal the problems and promises of European Union governance as
regulating social justice. Using a bottom-up approach through
in-depth interviews with posted migrant workers and administrators
involved in the posting process, Workers without Borders shows that
strong labor-market regulation via independent collective
bargaining institutions at the workplace level is crucial to
effective labor rights in marginal workplaces. Wagner identifies
structures of access and denial to labor rights for temporary
intra-EU migrant workers and the problems contained within this
system for the EU more broadly.
If you don’t know the Tobacco Wars, you don’t know American history.
Imagine a lawless militia of 10,000 masked men roaming the cities and countrysides of the United States. Brandishing firearms, these “Night Riders” set fire to warehouses and barns, destroy millions of dollars of product, and tear businessmen from their homes to torture them—their revenge against an apathetic One Percent who profit off the misery of the working class. This is not a scene from an apocalyptic movie. It’s a fact of American history.
The most violent and prolonged conflict between the Civil War and the Civil Rights struggles, the Tobacco Wars changed the course of American history—and America’s economy. So why haven’t you ever heard of it? In Tobacco, Trusts And Trump: How America’s Forgotten War Created Big Government, entrepreneur Jim Rumford draws from one of the largest private collections of Tobacco Wars primary documents, as well as his own family ties to the conflict, to show how the United States today is spiraling toward the same chaos that sparked the bloody war between the working class of America’s heartland and the Great Tobacco Trust—and why the Establishment doesn’t want you to know about it. Citing nearly three hundred sources, Rumford weaves a compelling narrative to show how the subjects of recent headlines—the TEA Party, Silicon Valley oligopolies, Occupy Wall Street protests, the Socialist rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders, outsourcing of blue collar careers, and the election of President Donald J. Trump—echo those of a century ago.
From Big Business monopolies that triggered financial recessions to the Populist and Progressive movements that enabled Big Government to strip Americans of numerous freedoms, the consequences of the Tobacco Wars could not be more relevant today.
Corporate governance is a complex idea that is often
inappropriately simplified as a cookbook of recommended measures to
improve financial performance. Meta studies of published research
show that the supposed benign effects of these measures -
independent directors or highly incentivised executives - are at
best context-specific. There is thus a challenge to explain the
meaning, purpose, and importance of corporate governance. This
volume addresses these issues. The issues discussed centre on
relationships within the firm e.g. between labour, managers, and
investors, and relationships outside the firm that affect consumers
or the environment. The essays in this collection are the
considered selection by the editors and the contributors themselves
of what are seen as some of the most weighty and urgent issues that
connect the corporation and society at large in developed economies
with established property rights. The essays are to be read in
dialogue with each other, giving a richer understanding than could
be obtained by shepherding all contributions into a single mould.
Nevertheless taken together they demonstrate a shared sense of deep
concern that the corporate governance agenda has been and still is
on the wrong track. The contributors, individually and
collectively, identify in this compendium both a research programme
and a platform for change.
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