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.

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.

During the independence era in Mexico, individuals and factions of all stripes embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the broad struggle for political power. Taking readers into the printing shops, government offices, courtrooms, and streets of Mexico City, historian Corinna Zeltsman reconstructs the practical negotiations and discursive contests that surrounded print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses and examining their social practices and aspirations, Zeltsman explores how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship. Beautifully crafted and ambitious in scope, Ink under the Fingernails sheds new light on Mexico's histories of state formation and political culture, identifying printing shops as unexplored spaces of democratic practice, where the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor blurred.

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.

In this groundbreaking study of organic farming, Julie Guthman challenges accepted wisdom about organic food and agriculture in the Golden State. Many continue to believe that small-scale organic farming is the answer to our environmental and health problems, but Guthman refutes popular portrayals that pit "small organic" against "big organic" and offers an alternative analysis that underscores the limits of an organic label as a pathway to transforming agriculture.
This second edition includes a thorough investigation of the federal organic program, a discussion of how the certification arena has continued to grow and change since its implementation, and an up-to-date guide to the structure of the organic farming sector. "Agrarian Dreams "delivers an indispensable examination of organic farming in California and will appeal to readers in a variety of areas, including food studies, agriculture, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history.

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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.

Cole saw the trade unions as being critical to progress, but to realise their role they needed to change and the issue of trade union structure therefore became fundamental. He considered in this volume that trade union structure was a central problem of the labour movement - he described British trade unionism as a movement bereft of ideas and policy. He discusses the evolution in the trade unions to cover not only wages and working conditions but the organisation and control of industry.

Only by adopting a new style of high-performance union management can labor recover and revitalize itself, says Thomas A. Hannigan, a 40-year member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. His book offers a practical, common sense understanding of how a successful management works and how it can be used in day-to-day union activities. For the first time, he links the nine basic union functions to the four basic management functions. Written specifically for union officers and upcoming leaders, the book provides them with a way to translate material customarily directed to business executives into language that labor people can understand and put to immediate use. The book also offers a potent alternative to today's slice and slash, centralize and downsize union style of management. In addition, it offers a blueprint for building new unions and making labor more effective, not only for its own benefit, but also for the benefit of American society. An important, readable, unique text for people at almost all levels of union administration and industrial relations. Students will be exposed to an entirely new dimension of the American labor movement.

Hannigan redefines unions to focus attention on the interests of workers in the workplace, and on the importance of providing a sense of community between members of unions, between unions and other unions, and between unions and government. He maintains that a style of democratic, participative management will breathe new life into unions, and that a better understanding of management responsibilities by union leaders is essential for labor's survival as an effective representative of workers in the new American workplace. High-performance union managers will be able to explore, develop and use new technologies, and to build strong, autonomous, democratic, value-based, and mission-driven locals. "Managing TomorroW's High-Performance Unions" includes innovative concepts such as the membership and leadership depth of participation models. It also proposes the creation of a new AFL-CIO executive board to lead organized labor into the 21st century, an institute for managing labor organizations, social research departments, lifetime membership, expanded membership bases, and the intense use of what Hannigan calls enabling technologies. He sees adminstrative and support centers as practical alternatives to union mergers.

The McDonald's Corporation is not only the largest system-wide sales service in the world, it is a phenomenon in its own right, and is now recognized as the most famous brand in the world. By providing a detailed analysis of the extent to which the McDonald's Corporation adapts or imposes its labour relations policies in Europe, this volume represents a real life case study revealing the interaction between a global multi-national enterprise and the regulatory systems of a number of different European countries. Key features include:

* an overview of the McDonald's Corporation's development and structure
* an analysis of its corporate culture and the issues of franchising
* an examination of key union strategies, including systems of co-determination, consultation and collective-bargaining
* a chapter dealing specifically with European legislation, in particular the McDonald's European Works Council
The author systematically analyzes the conflict between the McDonald's Corporation and the industrial relations systems of the European countries within which it operates, and exposes this conflict as an 'unequal struggle' between economic liberalism and collectivism.

This book traces the role of the UGTT (the Tunisian General Labour Union) during Tunisia's 2011 revolution and the transition period that ensued - Tunisia being the Arab country where trade unionism was the strongest and most influential in shaping the outcomes of the uprising. The UGTT; From its role as the cornerstone of the nationalist movement in the colonial era, has always had a key place in Tunisian politics: not so much a labour union but as an organisation that has always linked social struggles to political and national demands. Examining the role played by the UGTT in Tunisia's revolution and more generally in the restructuring of the Tunisian political arena during the three years following the popular uprising. This book asks searching questions such as; how did UGTT interact with the popular uprising that led to the departure of Ben Ali? What was the role played by the UGTT in the "political transition" leading to the adoption on January 26, 2014 of the first democratic constitution in the country's history? How successful was the UGTT in neutralizing the risk of self- implosion caused by the different political and social crises? And what are the challenges that the UGTT faces in the new political landscape? This volume will be of key reading interest to scholars and researchers of social movements, labour movements, organizational studies, political transitions and Arab revolutions and also likely to be of interest to practitioners especially among activists, unionists and advocates within civil society.

This book, first published in 1973, analyses and sets in context one of the major issues in the growth of the European economy. Workers' participation played an increasingly vital role in industrial relations. This book looks at the background and development of different types of participation in Britain, ranging from workers' attempts at co-operative production, through the schemes in the nationalised industries of mining and steel, to the Fairfields Experiment and the Upper Clyde 'work-in' in shipbuilding. This book concludes with an account of the developments in worker councils and worker directors in nine other European countries.