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

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.

For up to twenty years after the Second World War both in Britain and the US boasted `mature' industrial relations systems supported by their governments and, allowing for some differences in degree, by most employers. Since the early 1980s, these systems have been critically weakened. This comparative industrial relations text explains this development primarily through the withdrawal of public policy support and, mainly in Britain's case, its replacement by government hostility. An important consequence of this is the erosion of the effective defence and representation of employee interests as the managerial prerogative has been allowed, even encouraged, to extend its authority in the workplace. The `representation gap' has grown so that six out of seven US employees, and two out of three British, are not represented at work, at the same time as there has been increasing discussion of `team' working etc. This could be a serious negative development for economic performance. A growing body of research is indicating that employers who bargain with trade unions, or enter into partnerships with them, are likely to be more productive than their non-union competitors. More importantly, the size of the representation gap presents a clear denial of the democratic rights of citizens, in their role as employees, with potentially serious implications for social stability both within and beyond the workplace.

In some western European countries trade unions and employers' organizations share responsibility with government for maintaining order and efficiency in the labour market as a matter of course. in others such a role is seen as an unacceptable interference with either the free market or the prerogatives of the state, or both. How can we explain these differences? How enduring are they? Do they matter? In the 1970s there seemed to be a growing popularity for the first approach, leading to the explosion of interest in neo-corporatism; did all that evaporate during the ostensibly neo-liberal 1980s? Colin Crouch tries to answer these questions with reference to fifteen western European nations. Using a combination of rational choice theory and historical analysis he traces the development of industrial relations systems in these countries from the 1870s to the present. He ends by seeking explanations for differences further back in time, showing that longer-term historical explanations of contemporary institutions are more necessary than most exercises in policy analysis prefer to accept. 'an outstanding example of the fusion of theoretical economic analysis with historical perspective. Recommended at all levels' Choice 'It is difficult to do justice to this oustanding book in a short review or at a single reading. Colin Crouch's ambitious comparative survey of states and industrial relations provides both an abstract framework for comparative study . . . and a framework for comparing the level and form of corporatism in industrial relations.' Political Studies

This is the third and final volume in the authoritative History of the British Trade Unions since 1889. It covers the years between 1934 and 1951. These years saw gradual recovery from the world-wide economic depression, the Second World War, and its aftermath of austerity and development. It was a period of great achievement for the labour movement. Hugh Armstrong Clegg traces the story of the trade unions, their policies, their leaders, and their relations with government. Professor Clegg carefully sets his study against the economic and political background of the period, and provides a wealth of valuable detail. This is a comprehensive and dispassionate account by a leading authority on British trade unions and their history, which will be an important source for all historians of the labour movement in Britain.

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.

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

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

Using an interdisciplinary lens, this book innovatively explores the conflicts and shifting boundaries in organisational, professional, legal and economic structures, caused by the rise of the gig economy. The dynamic structural model of the gig economy is introduced to interrogate the inner workings of the amorphous gig economy at the Macro, Meso and Micro levels of analysis. Conflict and Shifting Boundaries in the Gig Economy examines a range of tensions and issues, including; The future of trade unions in the gig economy Employment status and contractual arrangements Talent management in the gig economy Employee voice and whistleblowing Career choices and organisational attractiveness Trajectory and impact at macro economic levels. Organisational examples and a focus on the perspective of those engaged in gig work introduce new insights and research questions on the current and future challenges posed by the gig economy, alongside using the structural dynamic model as a tool to understand actors and organisational experiences and build appropriate interventions.

This is a study of working women in Scotland in the period 1850-1914. In a detailed scholarly analysis, based on a wide range of contemporary sources, Eleanor Gordon uncovers the patterns of their employment, their involvement in and relationship to trades unionism, and the forms of their workplace resistance and struggles. Focusing particularly on women working in Dundee's jute industry, Dr Gordon's study integrates labour history and the history of gender. It is a stimulating and thorough account, which challenges many assumptions about the organizational apathy of women workers and about the inevitable division between workplace and domestic ideologies. It makes an important contribution to current historiographical debates over the sexual division of labour, working-class consciousness, and domestic ideologies, and to the history of women in Scotland.

Workplace compensation has become an industry unto itself. What are its relations of production and role in contemporary capitalism? In Lost-Time Injury Rates Rodrigo Finkelstein examines the information-intensive operations of recording and processing work-related accidents, diseases and fatalities carried out by Workers' Compensation Systems. Situated within the field of political economy of information, this critique contributes to the understanding of how injury rates service a specific sector of the economy by constructing lost labour power for sale. Finkelstein convincingly argues that injury rates must be seen as grounded in the capitalist mode of production, and that they constitute a historical social relation that, by taking the semblance of inductive indicators, conceal specific capitalist relations that bring about the exchange and distribution of lost labour power among capitalists and wage labourers.

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.

In May 1937, seventy thousand workers walked off their jobs at four large steel companies known collectively as "Little Steel." The strikers sought to make the companies retreat from decades of antiunion repression, abide by the newly enacted federal labor law, and recognize their union. For two months a grinding struggle unfolded, punctuated by bloody clashes in which police, company agents, and National Guardsmen ruthlessly beat and shot unionists. At least sixteen died and hundreds more were injured before the strike ended in failure. The violence and brutality of the Little Steel Strike became legendary. In many ways it was the last great strike in modern America. Traditionally the Little Steel Strike has been understood as a modest setback for steel workers, one that actually confirmed the potency of New Deal reforms and did little to impede the progress of the labor movement. However, The Last Great Strike tells a different story about the conflict and its significance for unions and labor rights. More than any other strike, it laid bare the contradictions of the industrial labor movement, the resilience of corporate power, and the limits of New Deal liberalism at a crucial time in American history.

Coming at a time of profound change in the global conditions under which American organized labor exists, The Future of the American Labor Movement describes and analyzes labor's strategic alternatives. It casts its net broadly, taking into account ideas that range from the current European Social Dialogue to the methods of the nineteenth Century American Knights of Labor. There are a number of intriguing strategies that have potential for reviving the U.S. labor movement, of which worker ownership and labor capital strategies are examples. There is a necessity for a number of diverse strategies to be pursued simultaneously. For this to work, there has to be a a broad movement of labor, consisting of diverse parts, held together by a clear idea of its purpose and a new structure. Hoyt N. Wheeler is Professor of Management and Chair, Management Department, Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. Wheeler is a former president of the Industrial Relations Research Association, and editor of its magazine Perspectives on Work. He has won teaching awards at the University of Minnesota and at the University of South Carolina. His publications include Industrial Conflict: An Integrative Theory (South Carolina, 1985), which was a Choice magazine as a Outstanding Academic title, and Workplace Justice: Employment Justice in International Perspective (co-editor, Flower, 1994). Wheeler is an attorney specializing in labor law, and labor relations arbitrator and a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators.

Bringing Peace Into the Room examines the personal qualities that make a mediator effective. The eminent authors of this volume go beyond traditional descriptions of academic training, theoretical orientation, and refinement of technique to confront issues related to personal temperament and the crucial psychological, intellectual and spiritual qualities of the mediation professional— qualities that are often the most potent elements of successful mediation. In this comprehensive resource, Daniel Bowling and David Hoffman bring together a stellar panel of practitioners, academics, teachers, and trainers in the field— Michele LeBaron, Kenneth Cloke, Robert Benjamin, Don Saposnek, Sara Cobb, Peter Adler, Jonathan Reitman, Lois Gold, Marvin Johnson, and others— ¾who share their personal experiences as mediators. Each contributor demonstrates that at the very heart of conflict resolution is the subtle interaction between the parties and the mediator's personal and authentic style.

In this book, Roy Church and Quentin Outram investigate the history of strike activity in the British coal mining industry, a byword for industrial militancy since the late nineteenth century. Strikes and Solidarity takes a multidisciplinary approach that blends quantitative and qualitative research methods to form a new explanation for the pattern of strike activity in the industry. It will be of interest to economic and social historians, sociologists and industrial relations specialists.

This book explores new forms of popular organisation that emerged from strikes in India and Brazil between 2011 and 2014. Based on four case studies, the author traces the alliances and relations that strikers developed during their mobilisations with other popular actors such as students, indigenous peoples, and people displaced by dam projects. The study locates the mass strikes in Brazil's construction industry and India's automobile industry in a global conjuncture of protest movements, and develops a new theory of strikes that can take account of the manifold ways in which labour unrest is embedded in local communities and regional networks. "Joerg Nowak has written an ambitious, wide-ranging and very important book. Based on extensive empirical research in Brazil and India and a thorough analysis of the secondary literature, Nowak reveals that numerous labour conflicts develop in the absence of trade unions, but with the support of kinship networks, local communities, social movements and other types of associations. This impressive work may well become a major building block for a new interpretation of global workers' struggles." -Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands "Nowak's book meticulously details the trajectory of strikes and its resultant new forms of organisations in India and Brazil. The central focus of this analytically rich and thought provoking book is to search for a new political alternative model of organising workers. A very good deed indeed!" -Nandita Mondal, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India "Joerg Nowak analyses with critical sense forms of popular organization that often remain invisible. It is an indispensable book for all those who are looking for more effective analytical resources to better understand the present situation and the future promises of the workers' movements." -Roberto Veras de Oliveira, Federal University of Paraiba, Brazil "In this timely and important study, Nowak convincingly challenges the dominant Eurocentric approach to labour conflict and calls for a new theory of strikes. He stresses the need to engage in a wider perspective that includes social reproduction, neighbourhood mobilisations, and the specific traditions of struggles in the Global South." -Edward Webster, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

Collective bargaining is still the main vehicle worldwide for labor to negotiate with management in both the public and private sectors. This book presents a new theoretical model of union bargaining. It challenges the commonly held view that collective bargaining has a negative impact on economic welfare and argues that with the existence of market failure, collective bargaining can be welfare enhancing. This book will be a research resource for scholars, professionals and policymakers and supplementary reading for upper-level courses in labor economics, public economics, game theory and international economics.

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.

Heroic Defeats is a comparative investigation of how unions and firms interact when economic circumstances require substantial job loss. Using simple game theory to generate testable propositions about when these situations will result in industrial conflict, Professor Golden illustrates the theory in a range of situations between 1950 and 1985 in Japan, Italy, and Britain. Additionally, the author shows how the theory explains why strikes over job loss almost never occur in postwar unionised firms in the United States. With its blend of rational choice and comparative politics, Heroic Defeats is the first systematic attempt to account for industrial conflict or its absence in situations of mass job loss. This book should be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, economists, and students of labour and industrial relations, as well as specialists in European and Japanese history.

This book analyzes the crucial features of unionized labor markets in industrialized countries, with particular emphasis on Britain and the United States. The techniques used by economists to model unionized labor markets are carefully explained. The connection between theoretical modeling and empirical testing of the theories is also emphasized. The book is directed to undergraduate economics students studying labor economics and to masters students in economics or industrial relations, but it is also accessible to general readers with a quantitative background.

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.

Why has democracy flourished in the Federal Republic of Germany despite that country's troubled past? Exhaustive research in German historical archives illuminates the pivotal role played by the veterans of the Christian trade unions of the Weimar Republic, the only group to participate in both of Germany's most successful political experiments after 1945, a 'Christian Democratic' party to unite Catholics and Protestants, and unified labor unions for workers of all political outlooks. They perceived that feuds between the religious confessions and competition among three rival labor federations had greatly facilitated Hitler's rise, and they resolved to bridge both chasms. Playing an influential role on the left wing of the CDU from the 1950s to the 1970s, Christian laborites alleviated class conflict through new welfare programs and laws to grant workers a powerful voice in management decisions. They took the lead in forging the distinctive 'German Model' for labor relations.

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.