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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Industrial relations & safety > Industrial relations > General
Embracing individualism and antistatism, the United States traditionally has favored a limited role for government. Yet state intervention both against and on behalf of labor has a long history, culminating in the labor law reforms of the New Deal. How do we account for this irony? And how do we explain why, between World War I and the Great Depression, another leading industrial nation with similar ideological commitments, Great Britain, developed a different model? By comparing the United States and Britain, Larry G. Gerber makes clear that, in the development of industrial relations policies, ideology was secondary to economic realities-the structure of business, the market system, and the configuration of unions. Nonetheless, industrial policy developed within the broader context of the transition from the individualistic laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century to a collectivist political economy in which the state and organized groups played increasingly important roles while pluralist and corporatist models contended for influence. In Britain, where most business enterprises remained comparatively small, collective bargaining between workers and management became the norm. In the United States, however, large-scale corporations quickly rose to dominance. Eager to retain control of the production process, corporate elites resisted negotiating with workers and occasionally called upon the state to resolve labor crises. American workers, who initially opposed state involvement, eventually turned to the state for assistance as well. The New Deal administration responded with a series of new labor policies designed to balance the interests of employers and employees alike. Since state intervention did nothing to permanently change employers' hostility toward unions, the New Deal legislation was short-lived. Gerber's broad study of this momentous period in labor history helps explain the conundrum of a nation with a typically limited government whose intense intervention in labor relations caused long-lasting effects.
"In the business and economic spheres, many of the most pressing ethical issues involve the employment relationship, such as the rights of employees versus shareholders, employee privacy and monitoring, whistleblowing, pay equity, discrimination, employee safety, anti-union campaigns, and minimum labor standards. Since the field of human resources and industrial relations is ultimately about people and quality of life, there is a pressing need to develop applications of business ethics for the employment relationship in the context of research, practice, and teaching." From the PrefaceIn recent years, by following media coverage of many scandals of accounting and accountability, the public has gained a greater understanding of what can happen when businesses do not adhere to ethical practices. It is now time for the human resources and industrial relations communities to explore the application of ethics to the employment relationship and to discover the importance of treating employees, not just numbers, properly."
This work is a study into labor practices, employers and employees. Contents: fundamental causes of labor unrest; relation between the employer and the employed; the worker and his wage; wages and profit-sharing delusions; fetish of industrial democracy; when they get together; economic truths of work; man and the machine; methods and policies of British labor.
Despite popular belief, the problem of illegal child labor has not been remedied. The practice persists in the United States and even appears to be increasing. Levine, an acknowledged expert in the field, reveals the nature and magnitude of this old problem in today's economy. Levine explains that since 1981, there has been a relaxation in enforcement of federal child labor law provisions. He presents the complicated elements and troubling implications of a problem that has come to be ignored or overlooked in American society, focusing especially on matters of occupational health and safety. This book is important reading for the general public, as well as for scholars and policymakers involved with children's and labor issues in the United States. The United States has more of its children in the workforce than any other developed country. They are found in textile, jewelry, and machine shops in New York and New Jersey, in Southeast supermarkets operating meat-cutting machines and paper-box bailers, in Washington state selling candy door-to-door, and in farming operations throughout the country.
John W. Budd contends that the turbulence of the current workplace and the importance of work for individuals and society make it vitally important that employment be given "a human face." Contradicting the traditional view of the employment relationship as a purely economic transaction, with business wanting efficiency and workers wanting income, Budd argues that equity and voice are equally important objectives. The traditional narrow focus on efficiency must be balanced with employees' entitlement to fair treatment (equity) and the opportunity to have meaningful input into decisions (voice), he says. Only through a greater respect for these human concerns can broadly shared prosperity, respect for human dignity, and equal appreciation for the competing human rights of property and labor be achieved.Budd proposes a fresh set of objectives for modern democracies efficiency, equity, and voice and supports this new triad with an intellectual framework for analyzing employment institutions and practices. In the process, he draws on scholarship from industrial relations, law, political science, moral philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, and economics, and advances debates over free markets, globalization, human rights, and ethics. He applies his framework to important employment-related topics, such as workplace governance, the New Deal industrial relations system, comparative industrial relations, labor union strategies, and globalization. These analyses create a foundation for reforming employment practices, social norms, and public policies. In the book's final chapter, Budd advocates the creation of the field of human resources and industrial relations and explores the wider implications of this renewed conceptualization of industrial relations."
"Investigating Harassment and Discrimination Complaints" is a hands-on guide for human resource professionals who are called upon to conduct a legally sound investigation into harassment, discrimination, or retaliation complaints. This important manual blends the information investigators need to develop the skills and competencies that are critical to successfully investigating harassment and discrimination complaints with a proven framework for undertaking the investigation itself. "Investigating Harassment and Discrimination Complaints" walks the investigator through the process of conducting a successful investigation and includes information about: The critical legal aspects of conducting an investigation How diversity affects harassment What needs to be in place prior to an investigation Creating a step-by-step plan How to properly document an investigation, and Administering discipline for policy violations and remedies for aggrieved employees "Investigating Harassment and Discrimination Complaints" also includes a valuable training program that human resource professionals can use to deliver in-house training programs on harassment investigations. In addition, it contains a wealth of resources including a sample policy, forms to use in an investigation, a sample report, a summary of real-world cases, and government publications from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The revised and expanded edition of Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff offers 350 titles compared to the original edition's 150. The new book is global in scope, with examples of labor films from around the world. Viewers can turn to this comprehensive, annotated guide for films about unions or labor organizations; labor history; working-class life where an economic factor is significant; political movements if they are tied closely to organized labor; production or the struggle between labor and capital from a "top-down" either entrepreneurial or managerial perspective. Each entry includes a critical commentary, production data, cast list, MPAA rating (if any), suggested related films, annotated references to books and websites for further reading, and information about availability of films for rental and/or purchase. This edition addresses both historical and contemporary films and features many more documentaries and hard-to-find information about agitprop and union-financed films.Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor features fifty-eight production stills and frame enlargements. It also includes a greatly expanded Thematic Index of Films. Two new sections will help the reader discover labor films in chronological order or by nationality or affiliation with certain cinematic movements. To read Tom Zaniello's blog on the cinema of labor and globalization, featuring even more reviews, visit http: //tzaniello.wordpress.com.Praise for the earlier edition "Zaniello has created a useful and far-reaching guide with abundant information. . . . These are the sorts of films that prove what James Agee wrote in these pages nearly fifty years ago: 'The only movies whose temper could possibly be described as heroic, or tragic, or both, have been made by leftists.'" The Nation"Zaniello has done a monumental job identifying the films that should be included in this genre. . . . Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff is sorely needed and long overdue." Cineaste"An engaging and opinionated book. . . . Even though mining, trucking, Jimmy Hoffa, and class warfare are the book's major themes, what holds the project together is Zaniello's sense of fun and wit. Zaniello is] a better writer than most major film critics." Village Voice Literary Supplement"
Rarely have the international human rights movement, non-governmental organizations, human rights scholars or even labour organizations and advocates given attention to worker rights as human rights. James A. Gross finds, however, that employers, not just governments, have the power to violate workers' rights.
Thousands of African Americans poured into northwest Indiana in the 1920s dreaming of decent-paying jobs and a life without Klansmen, chain gangs, and cotton. Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism by Ruth Needleman adds a new dimension to the literature on race and labor. It tells the story of five men born in the South who migrated north for a chance to work the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the steel mills. Individually they fought for equality and justice; collectively they helped construct economic and union democracy in postwar America. George Kimbley, the oldest, grew up in Kentucky across the street from the family who had owned his parents. He fought with a French regiment in World War I and then settled in Gary, Indiana, in 1920 to work in steel. He joined the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and became the first African American member of its full-time staff in 1938. The youngest, Jonathan Comer, picked cotton on his father's land in Alabama, stood up to racism in the military during World War II, and became the first African American to be president of a basic steel local union. This is a book about the integration of unions, as well as about five remarkable individuals. It focuses on the decisive role of African American leaders in building interracial unionism. One chapter deals with the African American struggle for representation, highlighting the importance of independent black organization within the union. Needleman also presents a conversation among two pioneering steelworkers and current African American union leaders about the racial politics of union activism.
Worked Over is a book about large-scale social change seen at close range, through the lives of generations of working people in a small manufacturing center along New York State's old Erie Canal. Their compelling stories add a new dimension to current debates over corporate power and the public good. Dimitra Doukas draws on ten years of ethnographic and historical research on the Mohawk River Valley towns of Herkimer, Illion, Frankfort, and Mohawk, where the Remington company, maker of arms and typewriters among other things, was for many years the backbone of a thriving regional society. Corporate takeover of the varied Remington enterprises in 1886 sent shock waves through this society, ushering in a century of social distress and decreasing political autonomy. Since the 1970s, the area has suffered mightily from deindustrialization. Local experience, Doukas finds, has shaped an American culture of strongly egalitarian ideals. From this perspective, the region's present plight appears, to many in the region, as a betrayal of American values. Knitting together the ethnographic present, the remembered past, and the historical past, the author tracks today's discontent to the dawn of the modern corporate era for a revealing and intimate look at the rise of a new political and economic power structure.
Worked Over is a book about large-scale social change seen at close range, through the lives of generations of working people in a small manufacturing center along New York State's old Erie Canal. Their compelling stories add a new dimension to current debates over corporate power and the public good. Dimitra Doukas draws on ten years of ethnographic and historical research on the Mohawk River Valley towns of Herkimer, Illion, Frankfort, and Mohawk, where the Remington company, maker of arms and typewriters among other things, was for many years the backbone of a thriving regional society. Corporate takeover of the varied Remington enterprises in 1886 sent shock waves through this society, ushering in a century of social distress and decreasing political autonomy. Since the 1970s, the area has suffered mightily from deindustrialization. Local experience, Doukas finds, has shaped an American culture of strongly egalitarian ideals. From this perspective, the region's present plight appears, to many in the region, as a betrayal of American values. Knitting together the ethnographic present, the remembered past, and the historical past, the author tracks today's discontent to the dawn of the modern corporate era for a revealing and intimate look at the rise of a new political and economic power structure.
Private-sector collective bargaining in the United States is under siege. Many factors have contributed to this situation, including the development of global markets, a continuing antipathy toward unions by managers, and the declining effectiveness of strikes. This volume examines collective bargaining in eight major industries airlines, automobile manufacturing, health care, hotels and casinos, newspaper publishing, professional sports, telecommunications, and trucking to gain insight into the challenges the parties face and how they have responded to those challenges.The authors suggest that collective bargaining is evolving differently across the industries studied. While the forces constraining bargaining have not abated, changes in the global environment, including new security considerations, may create opportunities for unions. Across the industries, one thing is clear private-sector collective bargaining is rapidly changing."
Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the
question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten
months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer
different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as
hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own
exploitation?
Exploring recent changes in employment practices in seven industrialized countries (Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States) and in two essential industries (automobile and telecommunications), Harry C. Katz and Owen Darbishire find that traditional national systems of employment are being challenged by four cross-national patterns. The patterns, which are becoming ever more prevalent, can be categorized as low-wage, human resource management, Japanese-oriented, and joint team-based strategies. The authors go on to show that these changing employment patterns are closely related to the decline of unions and growing income inequality. Drawing upon plant-level evidence on emerging employment practices, they provide a comprehensive analysis of changes in employment systems and labor-management relations. They conclude that while the variation in employment patterns is increasing within countries, evidence suggests that there is much commonality across countries in the nature of that variation and also similarity in the processes through which variation is appearing. Hence the term "converging divergences."
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?"
For more than a decade, Managing Public Disputes has been the first choice, hands-on guide for managers, offering useful instructions for handling a wide range of large and small public controversies from the national to the community level. It includes:
How to keep up to date with the current developments and issues in the study and practice of organizational behavior? That is the challenge for students, academics and practitioners. This series complements the standard tests of OB and the more comprehensive, historical review volumes, by offering concise, critical and stimulating accounts of the main issues and developments in topics of current and ongoing importance in OB. Whether employees should be stakeholders in their businesses and the relationship between employees and owners in general is a fast-growing topic and owners in general is a fast-growing topic and is explored in this volume of Trends by distinguished academics who are at the forefront of this important field.
This bookis divided into six chapters: a review of theory and research; diagnosing situational characteristics; measuring performance; estabiling pay increases; pay system administration; and pay system evolution.
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: 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.
Best remembered today for his fierce opposition to labor, especially during the Homestead Strike of 1892, Henry Clay Frick was also one of the most powerful and innovative industrialists of the nineteenth century. Kenneth Warren is the first historian to be given unrestricted access to the extensive Frick archives in Pittsburgh. Drawing on Frick's personal and business papers, as well as the records of the H. C. Frick Coal & Coke Company, the Carnegie Steel Company, and the U.S. Steel Corporation, Warren provides a wealth of new insights into Frick's relationship with such contemporaries as Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, and Elbert Gary. He describes and analyzes the key decisions that formed labor and industrial policy in the iron and steel industry during a period of growth that remains unparalleled in American business history. Not only an industrial biography of a driving force in American industry and the organization of American business, Triumphant Capitalism makes a major contribution to our understanding of the history of the basic industries, the shaping of society, locality, and region - and thereby of laying the foundations for the value systems and landscapes of present-day America.
After two decades of hands-on experience with performance management systems in some of the world's most well recognized organizations, Markle has come to propound what he calls "a universal law of modern business." People hate performance reviews. Drawing upon his studies of and experience with systems theory and illustrating his points with real-life examples, Markle explains why employees and managers both have come to regard the ubiquitous performance evaluation as industry's poorest performing, most ineffective, and least efficient personnel practice. By digging down to its roots, he helps us understand why attempts to correct the flawed system fail. He provides an innovative way to measure their ineffectiveness and inefficiency and then introduces his "catalytic coaching" to replace them. Markle shows how his system is superior to others in five key business outcomes: 1) positive behavioral change; 2) motivation to work hard; 3) retention of key contributors; 4) internal promotions and succession; and 5) prevention of and protection from lawsuits. Not only is catalytic coaching more effective, it is also more efficient: it requires far less time and paperwork to implement and maintain. Markle gives his readers all of the forms, instruments and detailed instructions they need to operationalize his system. Business executives, senior HR professionals, and organization development specialists will benefit particularly from his presentation, as will other managers, executives, and supervisors, all of whom must learn to "take ownership" of their responsibilities to their organizations and themselves.
Exploring recent changes in employment practices in seven industrialized countries (Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States) and in two essential industries (automobile and telecommunications), Harry C. Katz and Owen Darbishire find that traditional national systems of employment are being challenged by four cross-national patterns. The patterns, which are becoming ever more prevalent, can be categorized as low-wage, human resource management, Japanese-oriented, and joint team-based strategies. The authors go on to show that these changing employment patterns axe closely related to the decline of unions and growing income inequality. Drawing upon plant-level evidence on emerging employment practices, they provide a comprehensive analysis of changes in employment systems and labor-management relations. They conclude that while the variation in employment patterns is increasing within countries, evidence suggests that there is much commonality across countries in the nature of that variation and also similarity in the processes through which variation is appearing. Hence the term "converging divergences." |
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