Covering the role of trades unions and labour organizations in industrial relations, Industry's Democratic Revolution contains case studies from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and USA. Each chapter is authored by a president or secretary general of one of the largest industrial unions from that particular country, which gives an unparalleled insight into the workings of unions and their participation in the key issues of industrial relations such as: productivity factors; guaranteed wages; union participation in management decision-making; de-centralization of industrial power; and policy research.

This comparative study of industrial relations provides an analysis of a wide range of phenomena, with a view to uncovering the origins of national diversity. It takes into account the notion of strategic choice, set within a series of constraints of environment, organizational and institutional conditions and power relationships. The book: covers a wide range of examples from the UK, USA, France, Germany Italy, Sweden, Eastern Europe, Latin America, India and Japan; includes a comprehensive analysis of management and employers' associations, labour and trades unions; and examines the role of the state in comparative perspective.

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held to assess the current state of the analysis of the labour market and of industrial relations and their relationship to economic performance.;The matters covered include the value of the corporatist approach versus alternatives, for example, a sort of sector corporatism or a corporatist approach at the level of the firm; the future scenarios for industrial relations with a series of county studies with special reference to incomes policies and the departures from various neocorporatist models; the importance of institutions and public structures in industrial relations; labour market flexibility and unemployment.

Sex Worker Union Organising is the first study of the emerging phenomenon of sex workers - prostitutes, exotic dancers such as lap dancers, porn models and actresses, and sex chatline workers - asserting that their economic activities are work and as such, they are entitled to workers' rights. The most developed instances of this struggle, in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany The Netherlands, New Zealand and the US, have taken the form of unionisation. Sex Worker Union Organising analyses the basis and contexts for this struggle and assesses the opportunities and challenges facing these unionisation projects. It concludes that the most significant obstacles to the advance of these unionisation projects are the sparsity of sex worker union activists and the paucity of understanding of the sex worker discourse by sex workers and non-sex workers alike.

This volume contains papers dealing with topics such as the effects of company unions on wages, the effects of labour market regulation on hiring standards, coalition bargaining at General Electric, cooperative labour-management partnerships in the steel industry, the union commitment of adjunct faculty, the effects of union political outreach on union members political perceptions, preferences and voting behaviour, reinterpretation of "new" labour historians differences with "old" labour historians, and newly discovered lecture notes by industrial relations scholar Sumner Slichter that detail his views on the early development of welfare capitalism in the US. These papers contain a vibrant mix of disciplinary perspectives, analytical methods, arguments and conclusions about key industrial relations topics - and do so from both contemporary and historical perspectives. The volume should be of interest to industrial relations scholars and students worldwide.

In Work and Pay in the United States and Japan, authors Clair Brown, Yoshifumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman provide an integrated and detailed analysis of the components of firm human resources systems in the US and Japan. Drawing on data obtained from fieldwork in comparable establishments in these two countries, as well as from national sources, this work examines the relationship between company practices and national economic institutions.
The authors address a number of key questions about employer-employee relations. How have major Japanese manufacturing companies been able to convert the assurance of "lifetime" employment security into a source of superior employee efficiency and adaptability, when job and income security have been feared as a source of "shirking" and wage inflation in the US? How have higher economic and real wage growth rates been associated with greater equality in earned income distribution in Japan, when the incentive role of income inequality to worker effort and savings has been stressed in the US? How could Japanese emphasis on employment security in the firm be reconciled with greater price stability and lower unemployment than in the US? This work analyzes elements such as employee training and involvement programs, wage behavior as an incentive system and an alternate channel of savings, and synchronous wage determination (shunto) at work in the Japanese economy that provide for such successes.
The book also explores the costs that have been associated with these Japanese accomplishments, as well as who must bear them. In particular, it examines how Japanese women compare less favorably with American women in terms of opportunities for work, pay, and promotion; the higher hours of working time for men in Japan than in the US; and the constraints on mobility for Japanese workers. It also poses the question of whether Japanese unions are weaker than their American counterparts, or just more sensible and far-sighted. Finally, this \ork examines the outlook for these distinctive Japanese institutions and practices in a period of slower growth and economic "maturity."
Based on a research project carried out in both countries, the book concludes with the lessons that each country can learn much from the employment practices of the other. Work and Pay in the United States and Japan will be essential reading for students, professors, and all professionals involved with employment systems and employer-employee relations.

Who were the women who fought back at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet? Striking Women gives a voice to the women involved as they discuss their lives, their work and their trade unions. Striking Women is centred on two industrial disputes, the famous Grunwick strike (1976-78) and the Gate Gourmet dispute that erupted in 2005. Focusing on these two events, the book explores the nature of South Asian women's contribution to the struggles for workers' rights in the UK labour market. The authors examine histories of migration and settlement of two different groups of women of South Asian origin, and how this history, their gendered, classed and racialised inclusion in the labour market, the context of industrial relations in the UK in the two periods and the nature of the trade union movement shaped the trajectories and the outcomes of the two disputes. This is the first account based on the voices of the women involved. Drawing on life/work history interviews with thirty-two women who participated in the two disputes, as well as interviews with trade union officials, archival material and employment tribunal proceedings, the authors explore the motivations, experiences and implications of these events for their political and social identities.

This book examines the manner in which the EU affects employee relations systems in economically peripheral European countries, specifically Ireland and Hungary. It asks whether the EU offers peripheral countries the opportunity to modernize their industrial relations. Emer O'Hagan argues that the EU implements an unofficial development policy which it pressures states to adopt. These initiatives amount to the frequently referred to European Social Model (ESM), which, she argues, can cause difficulty for policy makers because it is ill-defined, vague and contradictory.

"Justice in the Workplace" acts as a central reference point for application of organizational justice and helps human resource managers relate the importance of justice to their work environments.
Forming much of this book's content, outcomes, processes, and interpersonal treatment are three powerful tools for building and maintaining workplace justice. In Part I these books are discussed at a theoretical level. Part II applies these theories to several issues important to both human resource management and society. And Part III looks at organizational justice in the years ahead.
Compared to the first volume, this book will appeal to practitioners and researchers in such applied areas as human resource management, industrial organizational psychology, and management.

This collection of country studies explores changing relationships between the state, employers and labour in an increasingly internationalized world economy. It covers ten countries and examines the tensions and contradictions caused by neo-liberal market agendas. The authors express concern at the potentially ravaging effects of market deregulation on organized labour and present a critical account of state efforts to emulate desired models of national economic development. While the central core of the book concerns itself with changing labor relations, this is placed within the wider context of state and employer strategy, and covers issues such as labour market segmentation, welfare and taxation regimes and varying approaches to corporatism.

This professional book for labor arbitrators, mediators, administrative law judges, practitioners in the field of labor relations representing either management or labor (or both), and others involved in labor relations and dispute resolution provides insight into the elements of an arbitrator's decision-making process in disputes involving employee discharge. Drawing on his own extensive background in the field, the author uses his own advisory letters of opinion, written to the parties of a dispute, to outline issues involved and the reasoning processes used in making decisions. These letters are from real-life dispute situations and provide sample case studies in a variety of settings and fact situations allowing the reader inside the arbitral resolution process.

The work sets forth the factors that an arbitrator will likely consider to be important in his or her determination of when an action by the employer should be sustained (judged fair and right) or overturned (judged to be wrongful). The work takes the process of dispute resolution out of the unpredictable, moving it instead to the methodical search for basic elements that have been considered by the Courts to be fair and supportable. Legal terminology is used within the context of particular cases, but is not so excessive as to create a problem for the average labor relations practitioner.

Caring is a nitty-gritty process. Cultivating Common Ground teaches us how to care at work with real life experiences, rather than through conceptual thinking alone. Caring relationships to our work and each other give meaning to our work and provide a powerful source of energy for our organizations. Therefore, we must release relationships from their hiding place in the informal structure of the organization. The way to do that is to work together, to cultivate common ground, in order to make a conscious commitment to hold a life and a task in common. As old structures crumble, we have the opportunity to build caring communities at work. This book explains what went wrong in the first place, names our fears, and provides real-life examples of how to release the power of relationships in the workplace.

Daniel S. Hanson is President of the Fluid Dairy Division of Land O'Lakes, Inc., an instructor at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, and a speaker and author on the subject of organizational change and personal empowerment. Hanson draws on his 30 years experience as a corporate executive for four Fortune 500 companies, his extensive research, and his own life-changing experience to offer practical, hands-on presentations and trainings. He is also the author of A Place To Shine: Emerging From the Shadows at Work, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996.
"This is a compassionate and powerful call for caring in the workplace. Dan Hanson is right on the mark when he suggests that we need to take courageous steps toward a new, caring workplace. He is one of the best teachers of building community at work you'll ever meet."
--Richard J. Leider, founding partner, The Inventure Group, author,"Repacking Your Bags" and "The Power of Purpose"
"Dan Hanson delves broadly and deeply into the nature of relationships in the workplace. He lays before us the common ground that nourishes results as well as meaning and satisfaction for the human heart and soul. Hanson provides the tools and knowledge we need to cultivate this garden. We are called to fertilize the soil with our own courage."
--Margaret A. Lulic, author, "Who We Could Be at Work"
Addresses the neglected issue of caring relationships in the workplace
Written from real life experiences
Looks at why caring work relationships have traditionally been looked down upon

John Dunlop is one of the world's outstanding figures in the theory and practice of industrial relations. In this book he advocates a better means to resolve disputes. He stresses that each side must work out its own internal accommodation as a necessary prerequisite to across-the-table resolution.

Strategic Networks examines the new style of industrial co-ordination which enables independent companies to work so closely together that they can sometimes present a 'single face' to the outside world. Co-ordination is not achieved by mergers and acquisitions, but through the creation of a 'strategic network' of companies working towards the same goals. Based on the author's extensive research, the book first analyses the economic arguments for industry co-ordination, and suggests in which industries it is most likely to occur. The second part of the book focuses on * managerial implications for this type of organization * impact on responsibilties * control without ownership * co-operation instead of competition * how to set up alliances and how to maintain them A wide range of international examples and cases are featured in the book. J. Carlos Jarillo is Professor of Strategy at the University of Geneva (previously Professor of General Management and International Strategy at IMD, Switzerland). His research on strategy has been widely published in more than two dozen articles and books. He also acts as senior adviser to a large number of international corporations.

This work examines the topic of dispute resolution, specifically the multi-criteria approach that seeks to arrive at a conclusion that is mutually beneficial to both sides. Through the use of decision-aiding software, the multi-criteria approach can allow each side to give on various criteria that are not important to it, but are important to the other side. In this way, a super-optimum solution may even be met, in which both sides receive something significantly better than they had expected. Such a result is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, Stuart Nagel points out, in traditional single-dimension dispute resolution.

Nagel and Mills describe the nature of multi-criteria dispute resolution utilizing decision-aiding software. The first part of the book clarifies the general character of computer-aided negotiation, computer-aided mediation, and super-optimizing dispute resolution. Part two guides the reader through the use of Policy/Goal Percentaging (P/G%) decision-aiding software, centering on general decision-making, negotiation, mediation, and prediction of outcomes. Multi-criteria resolution in the context of rule-making and legal policy disputes is the focus of part three, where such matters as determining initial alternatives and criteria, resolving deadlocks, and arriving at super-optimum solutions are discussed. Part four emphasizes dispute resolution in the context of rule-applying and litigation disputes, as well as mediation at the international level and between lawyers and clients. The final part deals with future applications, such as computer-aided mediation and group decision-making with phone modems. The book's combination of decision-aiding software, arbitration-mediation, and super-optimum expansionist decision-making brings a truly innovative approach to the topic of dispute resolution. This volume should be a welcome addition to academic, legal, and public libraries, and a valuable reference work for lawyers, law students, and legal professors and researchers.

Why has the drastic assault on U.S. workers' economic well-being represented by plant closings not spurred them to greater political and trade union militancy? The answers lie in the myths and power structure of our society's legal and business institutions. By comparing worker experiences in Youngstown, Ohio, where plant closings and layoffs are not regulated, and Longwy, France, where legislation had been enacted, Rothstein gauges the markedly different effects.

The Jewish Labor Movement was a radical subculture that flourished within the trade union and political movements in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Jewish immigrant activists--socialists, communists, anarchists, and labor Zionists--adapted aspects of the traditions with which they were raised in order to express the politics of social transformation. In doing so, they created a folk ideology which reflected their dual ethnic/class identity. This book explores that folk ideology, through an analysis of interviews with participants in the Jewish Labor Movement as well as through a survey of the voluminous literature written about that movement.

A synthesis of political ideology and ethnic tradition was carefully crafted by secular working-class Jewish immigrant radicals who rediscovered and reformulated elements of Jewish traditions as vehicles for political organizing. Commonly held symbols of their cultural identity--the Yiddish language, rituals such as the Passover seder, remembered narratives of the Eastern European "shtetl," and biblical imagery--served as powerful tools in forging political solidarity among fellow Jewish workers and activists within the Jewish Labor Movement.

The ideas behind economic democracy and financial participation are not new; the International Congress on Profit-sharing first met in Paris in 1889. The practical objective of many profit-sharing schemes was increased labour management co-operation. Some also had an ideal objective - the resolution of a perceived contradiction between concentrated wealth and power and the democratic ideal. In "Economic Democracy and Financial Participation", Daryl D'Art has two objectives. Firstly, to examine if, and under what conditions, profit-sharing schemes and employee shareholding can motivate workers and generate cooperative striving. Secondly, he identifies the schemes of financial participation which have the potential to realise economic democracy within the individual firm and society at large. To fulfill these objectives the author draws on the results of research carried out in the USA, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. By making a comparative international study he contrasts an individualist approach to economic democracy with a collective approach. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of economics, management, organizational behaviour, industrial relations, bu

This volume examines new theoretical developments in labour contracts and relates them to the actual content of such contracts, and to differences in labour contracts which depend on the specifics of the institutional environment in which they are negotiated. This study is done from an international perspective, by comparing differences in labour contracts among European countries and between Europe, Japan and the US. The comparison consists of a careful description of selected characteristics of labour contracts and traits of the institutional environment and an explanation of their national emergence. The novelty of the study lies in the integrated approach of practical specification of labour contracts and theoretical analysis based on economic principles of efficiency. Existing contract theory in labour economics is used and extended when necessary to explain the occurrence of certain contract clauses, the division between legal and private arrangements, the role and function of institutions in the labour market and so on.

An innovative study of labor relations, particularly the interactions of recruitment agents and migrant workers, in the mining concessions of Wassa, Gold Coast Colony, 1879 to 1909. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the historical study of labor in Africa. Unlike those of the past, these new studies are rooted in the recognition of Africa's dynamic, expansive, and productive informal sector. While this book focuses on one of West Africa's earliest large-scale industries, namely the Wassa gold mines in the southwest Gold Coast, it is not solely concerned with the traditional working class. Rather, it explores the plurality oflabor relations that characterized the mining concessions during the period 1879 to 1909, including the presence of migrants from various parts of West Africa as well as casual and tributary laborers, both male and female. In capturing the phenomenon of labor mobility as it played out in Wassa, Mediators, Contract Men, and Colonial Capital presents one of the fullest accounts of the labor agents who regularly brought groups of migrant laborers to the mines. The narrative discusses these agents' means of employment and roles in the informalization and indentureship of labor; in addition, it explores the regional dynamics of the recruitment machinery and confronts issues of coercion and choice. Scholars interested in African history, global labor history, economic history, and women's work in Africa will find much of value in this innovative study. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen is aResearch Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation (Marie-Heim Voegtlin Grant) in the history department of the University of Basel.

This volume discusses such topics as where we stand in industrial relations and human resources, critical junctures in the transformation of industrial relations systems, and successor unions and the evolution of industrial relations in former Communist countries.

As unions face an ongoing crisis all over the industrialized world, they have often been portrayed as outmoded remnants of an old economic structure. This book argues that despite structural shifts in the economy and in politics, unions retain important functions for capitalist economies as well as for political democracy. Union revitalization in the face of their current difficulties is therefore of fundamental importance.
The book charts the strategies unions use to respond to global union decline and to revive their fortunes in five countries - US, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain - providing a wide range of institutional settings, union structures, identities and union responses. It provides a rich source of documentation about union activity, but more importantly it goes beyond description to address two of the big questions in comparative research: How can we explain cross-country differences of union responses to global decline? And how effective are these actions in helping to revitalize the labor movements?
Union strategies and union revitalization outcomes varied strongly across countries and were shaped by national industrial relations institutions, as well as by the interactions between union, employer and state strategies. These findings support the argument for national divergence of the varieties of capitalism literature and challenge the globalization thesis, which predicts a degree of convergence in the fate of union movements across the advanced capitalist world. There is no single revitalization strategy that works well for all union movements; the same strategy is likely to produce different results in different countries. Moreover, evidence for variation inrevitalization outcomes emerges most clearly when we adopt a multi-dimensional conceptualization of revitalization, moving beyond union membership and density to embrace economic and political power as well as the institutional dimension of union reform. Despite serious revitalization attempts in all countries the scale of revitalization is extremely modest when compared to the great upsurges of unionism in history.
Varieties of Unionism presents important research and analysis of union strategy for academics and graduate students of industrial relations, management, politics, political economy, and sociology

This book examines recent developments in Brazilian labour relations. Analysing the current state of labour relations in Brazil, the author shows how the proposals advanced by the new unionism have put strong pressure on the corporate system still legally enforced and have successfully developed a new political culture he terms the 'political culture of active citizenship'.