This volume traces the attempts made after the Napoleonic Wars to link up all the numerous local and sectional Trade Societies into a single comprehensive 'General Trades Union' - attempts which culminated in the short-lived Grand National Consolidated Trades Union formed under Robert Owen's influence in 1833. Based on materials not previously used by historians, this book throws new light on the development of Trade Unionism, particularly in the North of England, during these critical years.

First published in 1960. This title is a study of one of the most controversial alliances in British political history. The 'wage freeze', Bevanism, the block vote, nuclear disarmament: these are only a few of the points at which the unions' activities within the Labour Party had roused hot debate. Drawing extensively on previously unpublished material and on discussions with past members of the Labour Movement, the author creates a survey of what the partnership really amounted to.

First published in 1973. In this study of trade union political activity in the period since 1945, the author demolishes much of the original rhetoric and inherited wisdom to provide an alternative insight on the entire subject of unions in politics. For his study the author has chosen to examine, in detail, the political interests and activities of a representative group of British unions, while an extended chapter makes a comparative assessment of the American experience. This title will be of interest to scholars and students of history and politics.

First published in 1973. In this study, the author adopts a historical approach, tracing the evolution of socialist thinking during the past century and relating this to the growth of the union movement. The Taff Vale judgement, the Osborne judgement, the roles of the SDF, the Fabians, and the ILP - these episodes are re-examined from a novel perspective, and the historical material is frequently illuminated by the use of contemporary analogies. The second half of the book presents an analytical study of differing union political theories and attitudes against the modern industrial background. Here the Marxist case is studied in depth and contrasted with the views of the Social Democrats. The author then considers the ownership and control of the economy, industrial relations, prices and incomes and inflation, making it clear where he feels the movement should stand on the key political issues of today. Finally, the book suggests the way in which the Labour Party and the trade unions should organise for power in the country.

First published in 1948, this book gives a full account of the development of the British Labour Party from its emergence as a national influence in the first world war to its return to power with an effective majority after the second world war. The study includes an epilogue which surveys the achievements of the party in the years after the 1945 election. This title will be of interest to scholars and students of history and politics.

First published in 1987. This book considers the Trade Unions-Labour Party relationship. It traces developments over the 1970s and early 1980s, and analyses the debate between those who argue for the Unions to take a more prominent lead within the Party and those who are against this. This title will be of interest to scholars and students of politics and history.

This title was first published in 2000: Addresses the question of how encompassing unions deal with regional differences and competing cultural identities - in particular those of migrant workers as a specific social and cultural category. Are regional and cultural differences jeopardizing the working-class solidarity?

The postman and the primary teacher, the midwife and the musician. Workers in shops, workers at sea. Solidarity with the Columbian farmer and the Palestinian fireman…   Modern trade unionists in Scotland perform roles in every imaginable location and are drawn from all backgrounds. They campaign to win on issues facing the colleague next to them or a comrade thousands of miles away. ’Mon the Workers tells their stories in their own words. It is a celebration of 125 years of the STUC, and a clarion call for the next generation to agitate, organise and win. This book demonstrates past achievements, explores the ideas trade unionists have fought for and rouses the movement towards future victories. 75 trade union members, reps and officials share experiences of union life from the anti-apartheid movement to Wick Wants Work. Alan McCredie’s charismatic portraits of 50 other activists from the trade union movement provide a complementary visual narrative. This very human book pulses with the energy of Scotland’s trade union movement, which has achieved so much and still has more to do.

The writings in this volume see the South African labour movement as a factor capable of shaping democratization. Through the strategic use of power, labour has reconfigured democratization through negotiated compromises, attempting to ensure that the costs of adjustment are not borne by workers alone. This examination of these strategies and practices assesses labour's capacity to exert influence in the future. The findings suggest that labour's marginalization would put at risk the consolidation of democracy.

This book, originally published in 1999, provided the first comparative, in-depth analysis of workplace relations in east and west Germany. The collapse of communism and the ensuing process of reform means that East Germany provides a particularly interesting case, having experienced rapid and radical political and economic transformation, and representing an historically outstanding experiment of the shifting of an entire social system onto a different society. This book examines the success of the institutional transfer of west German labour organisations into east Germany workplaces and addresses central questions such as : Can capitalist labour institutions be imposed on a former communist workforce? What conditions determine the success or failure of these institutions? Can 'social partnership/ between capital and labour be learned?

In this book, first published in 1975, the author examines the role of women in the workforce. Despite representing a rapidly increasing section of the workforce, why are women still overwhelmingly confined to unskilled jobs? Why do they hold such a tiny proportion of managerial and professional posts? In answering these vital questions Ross Davies shows how women's economic roles in pre-industrial society were modified and distorted by industrialisation; how this legacy of exploitation has affected contemporary attitudes among both men and women; and how the present situation should be seen and assessed in its proper perspective.

This book, first published in 1941, is concerned to relate the argument for Trade Unionism to the needs of women who work, whether in their homes or outside them. It is, in part, a historical analysis of the inter-war years, and it also prefigures the changes to women's working conditions brought about by the two World Wars. War necessitated the mass employment of women, and Trade Union action had greatly improved the position of the woman war-worker of 1941 compared to a quarter century previously. This invaluable book examines that Trade Union action.

This book, first published in 1994, explores the impact of work and gender roles on union activism, and identifies factors that support and hinder women's representation in trade unions. These issues are discussed in terms of gender role, work-related and union-related factors. The author details what trade unionists are doing to challenge inequalities that still exist, and identifies factors that divide and unite men and women within trade unions. The author shows the impact that feminism has had on the trade union movement and explores the extent to which men and women have similar priorities for collective bargaining.

The emergence of a 'labour market' in industrial societies implies not just greater competition and increased mobility of economic resources, but also the specific form of the work relationship which is described by the idea of wage labour and its legal expression, the contract of employment. This book examines the evolution of the contract of employment in Britain through a close investigation of changes in its juridical form during and since the industrial revolution. The initial conditions of industrialization and the subsequent growth of a particular type of welfare state are shown to have decisively shaped the evolutionary path of British labour and social security law. In particular, the authors argue that nature of the legal transition which accompanied industrialization in Britain cannot be adequately captured by the conventional idea of a movement from status to contract. What emerged from the industrial revolution was not a general model of the contract of employment, but rather a hierarchical conception of service, which originated in the Master and Servant Acts and was slowly assimilated into the common law. It was only as a result of the growing influence of collective bargaining and social legislation, and with the spread of large-scale enterprises and of bureaucratic forms of organization, that the modern term 'employee' began to be applied to all wage and salary earners. The concept of the contract of employment which is familiar to modern labour lawyers is thus a much more recent phenomenon than has been widely supposed. This has important implications for conceptualizations of the modern labour market, and for the way in which current proposals to move 'beyond' the employment model, in the face of intensifying technological and institutional change, should be addressed.

Central to this edited volume is the legal position and the labour situation of non-EU and EU low-waged migrant workers. Towards a Decent Labour Market for Low-Waged Migrant Workers presents ground breaking research on policies and practices in search of striking a right balance between the economic ambitions and the negative consequences thereof, for labour market dynamics such as down-ward wage pressures, unfair competition, the abuse of migrant workers and even the long-term setback for the children of previously low-waged migrant workers. Imbalances or presumed imbalances between free market mechanisms, labour migration policies, labour market protection and corrective mechanisms to protect migrant workers, thus come to the fore. The contributors to this volume will deconstruct some of these imbalances, and shed light on its causes, consequences and interrelatedness with other factors. Possible solutions that contribute to a decent labour market, in which rights of low-waged migrant workers are more respected, will be discussed.

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.

While negotiation has long been recognised as an activity that affects world peace it has also become a central aspect of professional life. The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of negotiation and conflict resolution as an important area of research and as an area of intense importance in professional areas such as law, government and business. This authoritative and comprehensive collection presents outstanding research on negotiation and conflict resolution that views negotiation as a multi-party decision making process. Negotiation and conflict resolution are conceptualised as a decision making activity, where the individual perceptions of each party and the interactive dynamics of multiple parties are critical elements. This collection provides an invaluable selection of the most important writing of perhaps the most dominant view of negotiation and conflict resolution, and creates an intellectual history in the process.

First published in 1986, this book challenges the notion that the miners' strike of 1984-5 was 'Scargill's Strike'. It shows some of the ways in which the strike, though nominally directed from above, was determined from below by multitudinous and often contradictory pressures - the lodge, the village and the home. The focus is essentially logical and gives particular attention to family economy, kin networks and intergenerational solidarity. At the same time it is concerned with the mentality of the strike - its ruling fears and passions. The first-hand testimonies that comprise the book attest to the attachment to 'traditional ways' as well as the potency of the influences corroding them.

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.

This new history of British trade unionism offers the most concise and up-to-date account of 300 years of trade union development, from the earliest documented attempts at collective action by working people in the eighteenth century through to the very different world of 'New Unionism' and 'New Labour'.

William Hal Gorby's study of Wheeling's Polish community weaves together stories of immigrating, working, and creating a distinctly Polish-American community, or Polonia, in the heart of the upper Ohio Valley steel industry. It addresses major topics in the history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, while shifting from urban historians' traditional focus on large cities to a case study in a smaller Appalachian setting. Wheeling was a centre of West Virginia's labour movement, and Polish immigrants became a crucial element within the city's active working-class culture. Arriving at what was also the centre of the state's Roman Catholic Diocese, Poles built religious and fraternal institutions to support new arrivals and to seek solace in times of economic strain and family hardship. The city's history of crime and organised vice also affected new immigrants, who often lived in neighbourhoods targeted for selective enforcement of Prohibition. At once a deeply textured evocation of the city's ethnic institutions and an engagement with large questions about belonging, change and justice, Wheeling's Polonia us an inspiring account of a diverse working-class culture and the immigrants who built it.

Product information not available.

The trade union movement internationally is finding itself peripheralized by a series of mutually-reinforcing processes: the on-going world economic crisis; the uneven transition from an industrial to an information and service capitalism; the aggressive policies of neo-liberalism; the collapse of Communism and Radical Nationalism; the decline of the globalization that undermines the nation-state to which union hopes have long been pinned. The editors argue that this crisis provides an opportunity for labor to recover or reinvent itself.

In the early hours of New Year's Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph "Jock" Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies-and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history. Blood Runs Coal is an extraordinary portrait of one of the nation's major unions on the brink of historical change.