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.

This collection of papers from the 1993 BSA `Research Imaginations' conference explores the interpenetration of the public and private spheres. The book comprises two sections, one dealing with aspects of employment and finance, the other with domesticity and intimacy. Topics covered include the changing emotional geography of workplace and home, the gendering of aspects of employment and organisation, marital finance and gendered inheritance, the management of food and domestic labour, researching the emotions, and understanding intimate violence.

This is the first detailed survey of democratic ideas on the British Left in the period leading to 1914. Socialists of the late nineteenth century inherited assumptions about the priority of democracy from a long tradition of British Radicalism. However, the advent of the Fabians, who rejected this tradition as primitive, and of an ILP leadership more concerned to enter than reform parliament, meant that the movement was split between 'strong' and 'weak' views of democracy. By the eve of the First World War a consensus was emerging that might have formed the basis for a more realistic and more radical approach to democracy than has actually been pursued by the Labour Party and the Left during the twentieth century. Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement assesses an important debate in the history of socialist ideas and in the formation of the British Labour movement.

This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. The authors explore three distinctive forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Labor, they argue, was working at cross-purposes through these three modes of militancy promoted by different types of leaders with differing agendas and motivations. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement. As they convincingly illustrate, the multiplicity of worker responses to the Cultural Revolution cautions against a one-dimensional portrait of working-class politics in contemporary China.

"Defines the challenges facing the movement and offers comprehensive prescriptions for its successful transformation."
--"The George Washington Law Review"

A valuable analysis of the rise, fall, and--hopefully--the revival of unionism in America. The book] distills into readable form a mass of legal and empirical analysis of what has been happening in the workplaces of the United States and other industrial democracies. Most important, Craver has drawn a blueprint of what must be done to save collective bargaining in this century--must reading for scholars, lawmakers, and, especially, union leaders themselves.
--"Paul C. Weiler, Harvard Law SchoolAuthor of Governing the Workplace: The Future of Labor and Employment Law"

"A thoroughly researched, insightful, and readable look at why American unions have declined. . . . This is a very informative analyis of a vital topic, and it will have a multidisciplinary appeal to anyone interested in union- management relations.
--Peter Feuille, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois"

When employees at firms like Greyhound and Eastern Airlines walk out to protest wage and benefit reductions, they are permanently replaced and their representative labor unions destroyed. Every year, the threat or drama of a high-profile strike--in air traffic control towers, at Amtrak, or at Caterpillar--makes national headlines and, every year, several hundred thousand unrepresented American employees are discharged without good cause.

During the past decade, employer opposition to unions has increased. Industrial and demographic changes have eroded traditional blue-collar labor support, and class-based myths have discouraged organization among white-collar workers. As the American labor movement begins its second century, it is confronted by challenges that threaten its very existence. Is the decline of the American labor movement symptomatic of a terminal condition?

In this work, Charles Craver presents an incisive analysis of the current state of the American labor movement and a manifesto for how this crucial institution can be revitalized. Journeying with the reader from the inception of labor unions through their heyday and to the present, Craver examines the roots of their decline, the current factors which contribute to their dismal condition, and the actions that are needed--such as the recruitment of female and minority employees and appeals to white-collar personnel--that are necessary to ensure union viability in the 21st century.

Craver thoughtfully discusses what labor organizations must do to organize new workers, to enhance their economic and political power, and to adapt to modern-day advances and to an increasingly global economy. He also suggests changes that must be made in the National Labor Relations Act. This book is essential reading for lawyers, scholars, and policy-makers, as well as all those concerned with the future of the labor movement.

This history of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo, analyses a period much neglected in historical research: from the end of the civil war in 1939 to the period of democratic change from 1976 to 1979, when the organisation was reconstructed after Francos death. The Franco years were characterised by extraordinary division within the CNT and by the bureaucratisation and ossification of the organisation now part in exile in France. The decimation of the Spanish CNT in 1947 by draconian repression enhanced the role of the exiled CNT, which was now the sole representative of the historic Anarchist movement in Spain. The moribund notion of Anarchism held by the exiled organisation could not attract recruits, and thus new forces drawn to Anarchism in 1960s Spain came through different routes, related, in large part, to the crisis within Marxism. Some of these local activists became convinced of the possibility for a reconstructed CNT, but only if the organisation were renewed. However, the exiled CNT opposed such ideas and used all possible means to undermine the movement for a new CNT. Although the reconstruction of the CNT from 1976 was characterised by the struggle between these two principal forces, the Spanish CNT captured the feelings and enthusiasm of Spanish youth, after the long dark night of Francoism. The libertarian boom was short-lived however, and by 1978 the CNT was in deep crisis, calling for the dissolution of the exiled organisation. The latter, and its allies in Spain, could not allow such a development and organised the Congress of 1979 to prevent this happening. The subsequent irrevocable division of the CNT sheds lights on the political, social and economic fractures that Spain still experiences today. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, LSE

In their efforts to achieve freedom, ex-slaves mounted a dual struggle to elude the personal domination of the old order and to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of emerging wage employment. This book draws on a rich documentary record to allow ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations that underlay their efforts. The author discusses the labor disputes that convulsed the post-Civil War South, in which can be read former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom.

Neither an autobiography nor a scholarly analysis, Labor's Struggles, 1945-1950: A Participant's View is a skillful blend of both genres. Informative and original in its insights and analyses, this book provides the reader with information available from no other source. These insights must be included in any subsequent efforts to interpret this period in labor history. Richter based this account largely on his own experience as legislative representative for the United Auto Workers-CIO from 1943 to 1947, as well as on documents and conversations from that period, supplemented with historical research. Active in the effort to educate the working class on all important historical and legislative issues and on the political process, Richter wrote and lectured often for UAW and other union audiences and authored a syndicated column that was frequently featured on the front pages of local union papers and city and state central council papers. This study of policy making in union headquarters and in Washington focuses on the 1945 splits within the CIO as well as the sharp divisions between the "social" CIO and the "opportunistic" AFL. In addition, it focuses on the Labor Management (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947, which divided an already fragmented movement. A foreword by David Montgomery, a prominent labor historian, introduces the author's story.

This work is an important addition to the rather limited literature on the social history of China during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on abundant sources and studies which have appeared in the People's Republic of China since the early 1980s and which have not been systematically used in Western historiography. China has undergone a series of fundamental political transformations: from the 1911 Revolution that toppled the imperial system to the victory of the communists, all of which were greatly affected by labor unrest. This work places the politics of Chinese workers in comparative perspective and a remarkably comprehensive and nuanced picture of Chinese labor emerges from it, based on a wealth of primary materials. It joins the concerns of 'new labor history' for workers' culture and shopfloor conditions with a more conventional focus on strikes, unions, and political parties. As a result, the author is able to explore the linkage between social protest and state formation.

Most existing theoretical approaches to industrial relations and human resources management (IR/HRM) build their analyses and policy prescriptions on one of two foundational assumptions. They assume either that conflict between workers and employers is the natural and inevitable state of affairs; or that under normal circumstances, cooperation is what employers can and should expect from workers. By contrast, A New Theory of Industrial Relations: People, Markets and Organizations after Neoliberalism proposes a theoretical framework for IR/HRM that treats the existence of conflict or cooperation at work as an outcome that needs to be explained rather than an initial presupposition. By identifying the social and organizational roots of reasoned, positively chosen cooperation at work, this framework shows what is needed to construct a genuinely consensual form of capitalism. In broader terms, the book offers a critical theory of the governance of work under capitalism. 'The governance of work' refers to the structures of incentives and sanctions, authority, accountability and direct and representative participation within and beyond the workplace by which decisions about the content, conditions and remuneration of work are made, applied, challenged and revised. The most basic proposition made in the book is that work will be consensual-and, hence, that employees will actively and willingly cooperate with the implementation of organizational plans and strategies-when the governance of work is substantively legitimate. Although stable configurations of economic and organizational structures are possible in the context of a bare procedural legitimacy, it is only where work relationships are recognized as right and just that positive forms of cooperation will occur. The analytic purpose of the theory is to specify the conditions under which substantive legitimacy will arise. Drawing in particular on the work of Alan Fox, Robert Cox and Jurgen Habermas, the book argues that whether workers fight against, tolerate or willingly accept the web of relationships that constitutes the organization depends on the interplay between three empirically variable factors: the objective day-to-day experience of incentives, constraints and obligations at work; the subjective understanding of work as a social relationship; and the formal institutional structure of policies, rules and practices by which relationships at work are governed.

A review of the way in which the Thatcher government dealt with employment reforms between 1980 and 1990. Included in the book are chapters on trade union democracy and the role of the TUC, deregulation of the labour market and an examination of how a Labour government would tackle these issues.

This revised edition of "Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice" follows the approach established successfully in preceding volumes edited by Paul Edwards. The focus is on Britain after a decade of public policy which has once again altered the terrain on which employment relations develop. Government has attempted to balance flexibility with fairness, preserving light-touch regulation whilst introducing rights to minimum wages and to employee representation in the workplace. Yet this is an open economy, conditioned significantly by developing patterns of international trade and by European Union policy initiatives. This interaction of domestic and cross-national influences in analysis of changes in employment relations runs throughout the volume.

The structure has been amended slightly. Britain is placed straight away in comparative perspective before attention focuses explicitly on employment relations actors, contexts, processes, and outcomes. Each of the chapters is written by authorities in the field and provides up to date analysis and commentary. A spine of chapters from the preceding volume have been revised and extensively updated and new chapters have been added to refine coverage of issues such as the private sector and developing legal institutions.

Overall, a picture emerges of an economy that is in incremental and contested transition. The imperatives of 'globalization' now infuse governance mechanisms that were once responsive principally to domestic agenda and employment standards are set now by the state that once were established through collective bargaining. It is this fragile and emerging model that will be tested significantly through sustained political and economic change.

"Completely revised, the latest edition of "Industrial Relations" provides an invaluable guide to the actors, contexts, processes and significant outcomes within British employment relations. Based on a thorough review of the latest research, it is essential reading for students, academics and those professionally involved in employment relations and human resource management."
--Edmund Heery, Cardiff Business School

"This is a terrific collection of insightful analyses of British workplace relations in a global context provided by leading scholars. The chapters creatively utilize a multidisciplinary and critical approach that reveals the continuing and unique value of an industrial relations perspective. The volume cleverly assesses how factors including increased demographic diversity, organizational restructuring, globalization, and the reduced coverage of collective bargaining are affecting the nature and evolution of work and workplace relations. It is a must read.
--Harry C. Katz, Cornell University, New York

"This volume definitely constitutes the most comprehensive and best collection of empirical as well as analytical essays on industrial relations in Great Britain. This substantially revised, enlarged and updated version of its well known predecessors puts the specific national experience in comparative context and international perspective. A truly interdisciplinary volume by leading authorities, this has to be highly recommended for domestic as well as foreign scholars, practitioners and policy makers."
--Bernt Keller, University of Konstanz, Germany

"With working people facing the worst crisis in generations, this book is a much needed reminder of the crucial importance of employment relations research in Britain. The 3rd edition of "Industrial Relations," which coincides with the 40th anniversary of the IRRU at Warwick University, provides a completely updated, cutting-edge analysis by leading scholars on work and employment developments in contemporary Britain. It delivers a most informative view of modern employment, its problems and possibilities. A must for students and practitioners in employment relations, human resource management and industrial sociology."
--Professor Carola Frege, London School of Economics and Editor of BJIR

Recent changes in public service industrial relations have created major public policy problems. This book introduces the main issues and theoretical perspectives of industrial relations in local government and the public services more generally. The problems of industrial relations are illustrated by case studies of a Thatcherite Conservative and a left-wing Labour Council in Britain. The author pays particular attention to the problems of sustaining management authority roles in elected public agencies. The series is designed to provide up-to-date comprehensive and authorative analyses of public policy and politics in practice and focuses on contemporary Britain. It embraces not only local and central government activity, but also central-local relations, public-sector/private-sector relations and the role of non-governmental agencies.

This book examines the interaction between multinationals and women in UK, Ireland, France and Germany, looking at inward investment by US and Japanese multinationals, as well as outward investment by European multinationals.;It attempts to show how multinationals perpetuate an unequal division of labour by gender in which women production workers are merely "nimble fingers". It discusses whether multinationals are exporting women's jobs from Europe in an international search for cheap labour; and it looks at how women have reacted to both the creation and destruction of employment by multinationals.

In 1971, Bruce Neuburger--young, out of work, and radicalized by the 60s counterculture in Berkeley--took a job as a farmworker on a whim. He could have hardly anticipated that he would spend the next decade laboring up and down the agricultural valleys of California, alongside the anonymous and largely immigrant workforce that feeds the nation. This account of his journey begins at a remarkable moment, after the birth of the United Farm Workers union and the ensuing uptick in worker militancy. As a participant in organizing efforts, strikes, and boycotts, Neuburger saw first-hand the struggles of farmworkers for better wages and working conditions, and the lengths the growers would go to suppress worker unity. Part memoir, part informed commentary on farm labor, the U.S. labor movement, and the political economy of agriculture, Lettuce Wars is a lively account written from the perspective of the fields. Neuburger portrays the people he encountered--immigrant workers, fellow radicals, company bosses, cops and goons--vividly and indelibly, lending a human aspect to the conflict between capital and labor as it played out in the fields of California.

This analysis of strikes is concerned mainly with the sociology of industrial conflict in Britain but including some international comparisons. The author has focused on the causes of industrial disputes and their meanings for those involved, aiming to present the views and theories of others rather than original views of his own.;In this 4th edition, the main text has been left largely unaltered, beyond updating the statistical tables and commentaries on trends, while the concluding chapter seeks to bring the argument up to date and gives some attention to issues of theory and interpretation which are raised in the body of the book. The guide to further reading has also been updated.;Richard Hyman is also author of "Industrial Relations - A Marxist Introduction", "The New Working Class?" (co-editor) and "The Political Economy of Industrial Relations".

Closing Sysco presents a history of deindustrialization and working-class resistance in the Cape Breton steel industry between 1945 and 2001. The Sydney Steel Works is at the heart of this story, having existed in tandem with Cape Breton's larger coal operations since the early twentieth century. The book explores the multifaceted nature of deindustrialization; the internal politics of the steelworkers' union; the successful efforts to nationalize the mill in 1967; the years in transition under public ownership; and the confrontations over health, safety, and environmental degradation in the 1990s and 2000s. Closing Sysco moves beyond the moment of closure to trace the cultural, historical, and political ramifications of deindustrialization that continue to play out in post-industrial Cape Breton Island. A significant intervention into the international literature on deindustrialization, this study pushes scholarship beyond the bounds of political economy and cultural change to begin tackling issues of bodily health, environment, and historical memory in post-industrial places. The experiences of the men and women who were displaced by the decline and closure of Sydney Steel are central to this book. Featuring interviews with former steelworkers, office employees, managers, politicians, and community activists, these one-on-one conversations reveal both the human cost of industrial closure and the lingering after-effects of deindustrialization.

On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 10,000 farm workers and supporters gathered at the California state capitol to celebrate victory in one of the most significant strikes in American history--one that made Cesar Chavez famous as leader of the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW).
In Why David Sometimes Wins, Marshall Ganz tells the story of the UFW's ground-breaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this dramatic tale. A longtime leader in the movement and current lecturer in public policy at Harvard, he offers unique insight. Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises had relied on migrant labor--a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In 1965, after successive waves of attempts at organizing this large and growing population, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, and the three-year-old NFWA all found themselves on the ground, recruiting members. That year, some 800 Filipino grape workers began a strike, under the aegis of the AFL-CIO. The UFW soon joined the action with some 2,000 Mexican workers. The UFW's leaders turned the strike into a kind of civil rights struggle; they engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycotted growers, and transformed itself into La Causa, a farm workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully? Ganz points to three elements: the greater motivation of its leaders, their ties to the community and access to grass-roots knowledge, and their open and deliberative decision-making process. In total, the ability to devise good strategy and turn short-termadvantages into long-term gains.
As both an insider and scholar, Ganz provides insight unavailable anywhere else. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminal contribution to the movement's struggles and ultimate success.

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.

This book examines development issues, particularly spatial integration, in Sub-Saharan Africa regarding its tropical timber trade, and the related formal-informal operational turf creation, control and dynamics. Focusing primarily on Ghana, Owusu examines the scramble to control the timber trade by various political and socio-economic interests, from the colonial to the neo-liberal era. In relation to this, Owusu documents the structural and organizational changes that have occurred in the region resulting from national and international development policies, such as modernization and neo-liberal structural adjustment on industrialization and development, and assesses the roles played by powerful international organizations such as The World Bank as agents of economic change. The discussion is couched in the critical but often unrecognized or neglected role the discipline of geography and its associated perspectives play in relation to examining and understanding the unequal relationship between the advanced and developing economies, and how that relationship affects development and trade behavior of developing economies. The core argument made regarding this relationship is tied to the structuralist perspective that Africa's persistent underdevelopment problem is rooted in the very structure of its political economy. Based on the discussion, Owusu identifies and distills lessons from Ghana's experience for Development policy and practice in Africa and comparable Developing countries in the 21st Century.

This book examines the ways in which collective bargaining addresses a variety of workplace concerns in the context of today's global economy. Globalization can contribute to growth and development, but as the recent financial crisis demonstrated, it also puts employment, earnings and labour standards at risk. This book examines the role that collective bargaining plays in ensuring that workers are able to obtain a fair share of the benefits arising from participation in the global economy and in providing a measure of security against the risk to employment and wages. It focuses on a commonly neglected side of the story and demonstrates the positive contribution that collective bargaining can make to both economic and social goals. The various contributions examine how this fundamental principle and right at work is realized in different countries and how its practice can be reinforced across borders. They highlight the numerous resulting challenges and the critically important role that governments play in rebalancing bargaining power in a global economy. The chapters are written in an accessible style and deal with practical subjects, including employment security, workplace change and productivity, and working time. The Role of Collective Bargaining in the Global Economy will prove essential for postgraduate students in industrial and labor relations, human resource management, economics and business studies, as well as industrial relations practitioners and researchers.

"A valuable contribution to public policy debates concerning the workplace of the future and the nature and implications of the 'information economy.'"
--Choice (of the first edition)

In this eye-opening book, Joan Greenbaum tells the story of changes in management policies, work organization, and the design of office information systems from the 1950s to the present. She describes the impact of new technologies on the organization of working life with a keen awareness of the social forces that seek to benefit from them, showing how the process is driven by the needs of capitalist profit and control over the workforce rather than the good of society or greater efficiency.

Windows on the Workplace takes as its starting-point the experience of office workers and their own accounts of it. The book includes interviews with a wide range of workers, including young people entering a workplace in which the expectation of stable, long-term employment has all but disappeared. Greenbaum's approach is to locate their experiences and expectations within broader social and economic patterns, and to show how these patterns are constantly changing.

In a field that is constantly changing, this book captures the moment and clarifies the direction in which it is moving. It exposes the myth that technological advance and free market economics are creating a better future for all, and reveals the reality behind the myth.

In its broadest sense, this book is concerned with the attempt by workers in Britain during the period 1760-1871 to engage in collective action in circumstances of conflict with their employers during a time when the nation and many of its traditional economic structures and customary modes of working were undergoing rapid and unsettling change. More specifically, the book principally focuses on the attempt by those workers favouring a collective approach to struggle to overcome what they felt to be one of the main obstacles to collective action, the uncooperative worker. At times during these decades, the sanctions directed by collectively inclined workmen at those workers deemed to have engaged in acts contrary to the interests of the trade and customary codes of behaviour in the context of strikes and other instances of friction in the workplace were severe and uncompromising. Stern and unforgiving, too, was the struggle between the collectively inclined worker and the uncooperative worker in a more general sense, a contest that occasionally took a violent and bloody form. In exploring the fractious and hostile relationship between these two conflicting parties, this book draws on concepts and insights from a range of scholarly disciplines in an effort to shift the perception and study of this relationship beyond many of the conventional paradigms and explanatory frameworks associated with mainstream trade union studies.