Neither an autobiography nor a scholarly analysis, Labor's Struggles, 1945-1950: A Participant's View is a skilful blend of both genres. Informative and original in its insights and analyses, this book provides the reader with information available from no other source. These insights must be included in any subsequent efforts to interpret this period in labour history. Richter based this account largely on his own experience as legislative representative for the United Auto Workers - C.I.O. from 1943 to 1947, as well as on documents and conversations from that period, supplemented with historical research. This study of policy making in union headquarters and in Washington focuses on the 1945 splits within the C.I.O. as well as the sharp divisions between the 'social' C.I.O. and the 'opportunistic' A.F.L. In addition, it focuses on the Labour Management (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947 which divided an already fragmented movement.

In reviewing major issues concerning the history of British trade unions in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, this book discusses many controversial aspects of trade unions. It includes their economic impact (a cause of higher unemployment and lower productivity?) and their influence on government (unelected partners?). The book provides students with an accessible introduction to the recent history of British trade unionism.

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

This is the first comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Donald Filtzer examines the main features of Khrushchev's labor policy within the overall context of "de-Stalinization" and provides a detailed analysis of shop floor relations between workers and managers, the position of women workers and their specific role in the Soviet economy. In his conclusions, the author relates the labor problems of the Khrushchev years to those faced by Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, thus helping to explain the failure of Gorbachev's policies.

This book explores the process of popular mobilization in contemporary Mexico through the experience of the country's most important organization--the teachers' movement. It creates a distinctive perspective on Mexican politics and makes an original contribution to the study of popular, or "social" movements, providing a richly detailed account of its organization, leadership, strategic choices, and factional divisions. But it also links the trajectory of the movement to the shifting legal and institutional terrain that composes its political environment, so revealing how it is shaped by, and how it shapes the political system. Through its innovative methods, which produce an unusual and compelling blend of fact and theory, the book uncovers the motivations and mechanisms of popular mobilization, as well as explaining its interactions with national politics in Mexico and beyond.

Title first published in 2003. In recognition of the power of organised labour, the ANC Government elected in 1994 granted South Africa's unions unprecedented legal and constitutional rights. Despite these gains, the country's unions have faced a fresh set of challenges, many of them emanating from their political allies in Government. From Parliament to the factory floor, South Africa's unions are now confronted with threats as dangerous as those they confronted when organising illegally in the heyday of apartheid. The purpose of this book is to examine how South African unions have responded and how well prepared they are to meet the challenges that confront them in the new millennium.

Due to economic crises, labor parties followed economic policies that hurt labor unions during the 1990s, such as trade liberalization and privatization. This book explains why labor unions resisted on some occasions and submitted on others and what the consequences of their actions were by studying three countries: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. The comparison between the experiences of the three countries and five different sectors in each country shows the importance of politics in explaining labor reactions and their effects on economic policies.

In Managing Competitive Crisis Martyn Wright examines how competitive crisis affected the management of work relations in Britain between 1979 and 1991. Based on longitudinal research and interviews with fifty major companies and employers associations, Managing Competitive Crisis is a unique book of topical interest for students of organizational behavior, human resource management and industrial relations and for those seeking to understand the future direction of European political economy.

Australia once had extremely high levels of trade union participation yet since the 1970s the number of union members has been falling dramatically. This book gives the clearest picture yet of why people do or do not belong to unions and, in a sophisticated way, examines the reasons for union decline. Uniquely, it considers both macro and micro levels, looking at the structure of the economy and the labor market, the ideological dispositions people have toward unionism, the role of the state and the political and industrial strategies of unions.

Australia once had extremely high levels of trade union participation, yet since the 1970s the number of union members has been falling dramatically. This book gives the clearest picture yet of why people do or do not belong to unions and, in a sophisticated way, examines the reasons for union decline. Uniquely, it considers both the macro and micro levels, looking at the structure of the economy and the labour market, the relations between unions and employees, the ideological dispositions people have towards unionism, the role of the state and the political and industrial strategies of unions. The author highlights the importance of structural and strategic changes in determining the direction of union membership. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of union decline, and its implications, and presents a range of strategies for reversing this downturn.

August Sartorius von Waltershausen (1852-1938) was an eminent German economist who visited the United States at the beginning of the 1880s and wrote a series of articles on the US labour movement, which were published in Germany. His training in the historical school of economics provided him with a different perspective from that of laissez-faire economists or socialists of his time. The articles are translated in this book, and presented with a biographical essay by Marcel van der Linden and Gregory Zieren, and with an essay on his contribution to the writing of American labor history by David Montgomery. This book provides rich insights into the character of American workers' organizations as they recovered from the depression of the 1870s, before the establishment of strong national institutions.

In the field of 'climate change', no terrain goes uncontested. The terminological tug of war between activists and corporations, scientists and governments, has seen radical notions of 'sustainability' emptied of urgency and subordinated to the interests of capital. 'Just Transition' is the latest such battleground, and the conceptual keystone of the post-COP21 climate policy world. But what does it really mean? Just Transition emerged as a framework developed within the trade union movement to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers' and frontline communities' jobs and livelihoods as economies shift to sustainable production. Just Transitions draws on a range of perspectives from the global North and South to interrogate the overlaps, synergies and tensions between various understandings of the Just Transition approach. As the concept is entering the mainstream, has it lost its radical edge, and if so, can it be recovered? Written by academics and activists from around the globe, this unique edited collection is the first book entirely devoted to Just Transition.

Scholarship on American labor politics has been dominated by the view that the American Federation of Labor, the dominant labor organization, rejected political action in favor of economic strategies. Based upon extensive research into labor and political party records, this study demonstrates that, despite the common belief, the AFL devoted great attention to political activity. The organization's main strategy, however, which Julie Greene terms 'pure and simple politics', dictated that trade unionists alone should shape American labor politics. Exploring the period from 1881 to 1917, Pure and Simple Politics focuses on the quandaries this approach generated for American trade unionists. Politics for AFL members became a highly contested terrain, as leaders attempted to implement a strategy which many rank-and-file workers rejected. Furthermore, its drive to achieve political efficacy increasingly exposed the AFL to forces beyond its control, as party politicians and other individuals began seeking to influence labor's political strategy and tactics.

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.

American labour history is typically interpreted by scholars as a history of defeat. Hidden by this conventional wisdom are a handful of militant unions that did not follow the putative Congress of Industrial Organizations trajectory. Based on three years of ethnographic research, this book examines a union that organised itself to systematically challenge management's rule on the shopfloor: San Francisco's longshore union. American unionism looks quite different than conventional wisdom suggests when everyday union practices are observed. American labour's trajectory, this book argues, is neither inevitable nor determined; militant, democratic forms of unionism are possible in the United States; and collective bargaining does not automatically eliminate contests for workplace control. The contract is a bargain that reflects and reproduces fundamental disagreement; it states how production and conflict will proceed.

Decades have passed since black lung disease was recognized as a national disgrace and Congress was pushed to take legislative action. Since then, however, not much has changed. Big coal companies-along with their allies in the legal and medical professions-have continually flouted the law and exposed miners to deadly amounts of coal dust, while also systematically denying benefits to miners who suffer and die because of their jobs. Indeed, these men and their families, with little access to education, legal resources, and other employment options, have long been fighting to wrench even modest compensation and medical costs from our nation's biggest mining interests-all to combat a disease that could have been eradicated years ago. Tracing their heroic stories back to the very beginning, Chris Hamby, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on this issue, gives us a deeply troubling yet ultimately triumphant work that promises to do for Black Lung what Beth Macy did for the opioid epidemic. From corporate offices and mine shafts, to hospital beds and rural clinics, Soul Full of Coal Dust becomes a legal and medical thriller that brilliantly traces how a powerless band of laborers-alongside a small group of lawyers and doctors, often working out of their homes or in rural clinics and tiny offices-challenged one of the world's most powerful forces, Big Coal, and won. Full of the rich and complex atmosphere of Appalachia and packed with tales of those who have toiled in the mines of West Virginia, Soul Full of Coal Dust Sis a necessary and timely book about injustice and resistance.

Originally published in 1904, Commanders of the Dining Room features brief biographies of more than fifty African American head waiters and front-of-house restaurant staff, giving insight into the traditions and personalities that shaped these culinary institutions. Maccannon, himself an African American and a former head waiter, also offers a brief portrait of the Head and Second Waiters' National Benefit Association (a union for the industry and for African American hotel workers). Though the HSWNBA was formed in Chicago and held conventions there, many of the waiters profiled in this book hail from southern restaurants. Maccannon published Commanders to increase the visibility and stature of Black waiters; to assure employers that they could count on members of the HSWNBA to thoroughly know their business; to attest to their commitment to be dependable workers; and to showcase model African American manhood. In the vein of Booker T. Washington, Commanders proclaimed to young waiters that they could achieve success if they educated themselves, worked hard, and joined an association like the HSWNBA. In Commanders they could see head waiters, at the pinnacle of the profession, who had started out at the bottom and worked their way to the top, overcoming a variety of challenges along the way.

This book examines social, political, and cultural conflicts opened by the abolition of slavery and the fashioning of wage relations in the era of the American Civil War. It offers a new, close look at the origins, goals, and tactics of popular political clubs created by emancipated workers in the countryside of one of the Deep South's oldest plantation states. The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record that allowed ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations and goals that underlay their efforts. Not satisfied to render freed men and women as objects of theoretical inquiry, this book vividly recovers the concrete practices and language in which ex-slaves achieved freedom and the expectations that they had of liberty.

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

The Australian Workers Union (AWU) has been one of the most influential unions in Australia's political and industrial history. From its beginnings as a sheep shearers union, it became known as a champion of compulsory arbitration, fighting for improvements in wages and conditions through the industrial courts. In the first part of the 20th century it expanded by amalgamating with other unions, its aim being the creation of one big union. Indeed the AWU became Australia's largest union, operating in all Australian states and across a wide range of industries. The book shows that the union has been a player in key events and crises in Australian history, including the great strikes of the 1890s, the 1916-17 conscription crisis, Labor's splits in the 1950s and the 1956 shearers' strike. The book features vivid portraits of the unique individuals who matched these great issues.

Employment Relations in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry presents a detailed review of employment relations within a distinctive and significant part of the service economy. Uniquely combining employment relations and the hospitality and tourism fields, this book draws on recently published sources to give readers a comprehensive and internationally comparative perspective on the subject area.

The text boldly extends more traditional analysis of employment relations by integrating new topics into the discussion, such as the role of customers and the implication of gender at work. It also explores issues of continuity and change in a specific service sector, examining the industry by workplace size and sub-sector, and is illustrated with numerous case studies. Material is included from 50 countries, across all continents, ensuring a fully international view is presented.

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone studying hospitality and tourism, industrial relations and human resource management.

Based on three years of ethnographic research, this book takes a close look at one of the CIO unions that did not move from craft to business unionism: the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union's (ILWU) major longshore local (Local 10, San Francisco). American unionism looks quite different than conventional scholarly wisdom suggests when actual union practices are observed. One finds that in the ILWU, resistance to management's authority is collectively legitimated behavior, and explicitly acknowledged as good trade unionism. This case study suggests that American labor's trajectory is neither inevitable nor determined; that militant, democratic forms of unionism are possible in the United States; and that collective bargaining need not eliminate contests for control over the workplace. Under certain conditions, the contract is a bargain that reflects and reproduces fundamental disagreement; it is a document that states how production and conflict will proceed.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia are better known for the stories told about them than for any document historical significance. Renowned for their audacity and hooliganism the 'Wobblies' were particularly notorious for their active opposition to World War I. This landmark book conveys the vitality and drama of Wobbly activity, and also assesses the impact of the IWW on Australian political and labour history. Drawing from an impressive range of sources, Verity Burgmann writes with vigour and passion about Wobbly culture, and describes their doctrines, methods and organisation. The book highlights the unique nature of the IWW in Australia, and traces Wobbly influence in much post-war activity. Now, with the widespread collapse of communism and the inadequacies of labour parties, the IWW, as an alternative form of revolutionary working-class politics, merits renewed investigation.

This book analyses the crucial features of unionised labour markets. The models in the book refer to labour contracts between unions and management, but the method of analysis is also applicable to non-union labour markets where workers have some market power. In this book, Alison Booth, a researcher in the field, emphasises the connection between theoretical and empirical approaches to studying unionised labour markets. She also highlights the importance of taking into account institutional differences between countries and sectors when constructing models of the unionised labour market. While the focus of the book is on the US and British unionised labour markets, the models and analytical methods are applicable to other industrialised countries with appropriate modifications.