This book analyzes consumer organizing tactics and the decline of the Seattle labor movement in the 1920s, as a case study of the U.S. labor movement in the 1920s. The book examines the transformation of the movement after the famous Seattle General Strike of 1919 by showing that workers organized not only at the point of production, but through politicized consumption as well, employing boycotts, cooperatives, labor-owned businesses, and union label promotion. It pays special attention to the gender dynamics of labor's consumer campaigns, as trade union men sought to persuade their wives to "shop union," and to the racial dynamics of campaigns organized by white workers against Seattle's Japanese-American businesses.

This book is based on fresh and original research with 50 EU business associations and 150 of their members, drawing on literature from a wide range of disciplines, and presents some highly original synthesis. It assesses the effectiveness of EU business associations and their potential to bring value to the EU policy-making process and to their members, and lends a methodology by which they can be evaluated.The book bocates and assesses factors in the environment of EU business associations that influence their 'governabliity,' that is their ability to unify their members' intersts and to ensure they work together for the sam purpose. It then examines variation in the governability of EU business associations. From this, the reader will be able to understand the prospect for, and limitations on, the effectiveness of EU business associations, why they vary in their capacities and performance, and why they vary in their ability to bring value to their members and to the EU policy-making process.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, many scholars and policymakers predicted that the pillars of Communism would collapse along with the state. Yet, the official trade unions not only continued to exist yet gained power in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. Sue Davis explains the reasons why the official trade unions survive and thrive and why new, independent unions remain weak despite massive Western assistance. She examines many factors ranging from state policy to labor power in the late Soviet period as well as the first five years of the post-Soviet era in Russia and Ukraine.

In May 1914, workers walked off their jobs at Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, launching a lengthy strike that was at the heart of the American Federation of Labor's first major attempt to organize southern workers in over a decade. In its celebrity, the Fulton Mills strike was the regional contemporary of the well-known industrial conflicts in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Ludlow, Colorado. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the strike was an important episode in the development of the New South, and as Clifford Kuhn demonstrates, its story sheds light on the industrialization, urbanization, and modernization of the region.

Drawing on an extraordinary collection of sources--including reports from labor spies and company informants, photographs, federal investigations, oral histories, and newly uncovered records from the old mill's vaults--Kuhn vividly depicts the strike and the community in which it occurred. He also chronicles the struggle for public opinion that ensued between management, workers, union leaders, and other interested parties. Finally, Kuhn reflects on the legacy of the strike in southern history, exploring its complex ties to the evolving New South.

It is fashionable to speak of trades unions in the UK as organisations in decline. However, it is their organisation and, in particular, their financial status, which ultimately dictates unions' ability to survive, recruit, and influence employers. This book provides the first systematic picture of union financial status for thirty years, and reveals a dramatic picture. Though, overall, unions have become financially less healthy in the post-war period, many unions experienced an improved financial position during the membership contraction of the Thatcher years. It also shows that the long term financial decline of unions has been more affected by competition between unions for membership than by the effects of traumatic industrial disputes.

European trade unions are among the most influential and powerful institutions within Western economies, in many cases cooperating with the government and employers' associations in socio-economic decision-making processes. Consequently they also play an important role in the formulation of policies relating to immigration and the migrant workers, who are arriving and becoming part of the workforce the unions are representing and protecting against employers and other authorities. However, trade unions have not always fulfilled their role as the most obvious organization to defend the interests of foreign workers to the extent they could be expected. The reasons for this are complex and due to conflicts of interests that arise from their intermediary position between employers, government authorities, and indigenous workers. This volume offers a rich analysis of the situation in seven major European countries but also a comparison of the data found and an attempt to account for the differences established. It ends with some conclusions on the prospects of trade unions within the European Union, and on the lessons to be learned from the present analysis.

This is a detailed study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Donald Filtzer examines the main features of labour policy, shop floor relations between workers and managers, the position of women workers and their specific role in the Soviet economy. Filtzer argues that the main concern of Khrushchev's labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This de-Stalinization had to be carried out without undermining the essential power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term tendency towards economic stagnation. In his conclusions, Filtzer shows how the labour problems under Khrushchev were the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.

Robert Taylor examines some of the most important personalities and events that shaped the Trades Union Congress during the 20th century, from the General Strike of 1926 to the New Unionism of the 1990s. The study includes portraits of Walter Citrine, founder of the modern TUC, as well as Ernest Bevin, Arthur Deaking, Frank Cousins, George Woodcock, Vic Feather, Jack Jones, Len Murray, Norman Willis and John Monks.

Robert Taylor examines some of the most important personalities and events that shaped the Trades Union Congress during the 20th century, from the General Strike of 1926 to the New Unionism of the 1990s. The study includes portraits of Walter Citrine, founder of the modern TUC, as well as Ernest Bevin, Arthur Deaking, Frank Cousins, George Woodcock, Vic Feather, Jack Jones, Len Murray, Norman Willis and John Monks.

This is an attempt to examine whether trade unions in Japan contributed to raising wages, productivity and firm's performance. In the western world trade unions are often regarded as organizations which prevent firms from performing well. The Japanese case may be different from Europe and North America. The book investigates who in Japan joins trade unions and asks whether there is any difference in the satisfaction level of employees, the wage level, and labour turnover rates between union members and non-union members.

A contemporary classic in Peru, where it was first published in 1986, this book explores changes in the political identity and economic strategies of the Peruvian working class in the 1970s and 1980s. Jorge Parodi uses a case study of Metal Empresa, a large factory in Lima, to trace the surge and decline of the labor movement in Peru--and in Latin America more generally--through the successes and frustrations of the members of a once-powerful union as they coped with the nation's deteriorating economic situation. By the early 1970s, Metal Empresa was the site of one of the most radical and aggressive unions in Peruvian industry. But as the decade drew to a close, political and economic crises soured the environment for trade unionism and rendered unions less able to produce palpable benefits for their members. Through in-depth, often poignant interviews, including an extensive oral history of one of the workers, Jesus Zuniga, Parodi shows how workers desperate to support themselves and their families were increasingly forced to seek opportunities outside the industrial sector. In the process, he shows, they began to question their very identities as workers. |A contemporary classic in Peru, this 1986 book is now available in English. It explores changes in the political identity and economic strategies of the Peruvian working class in the 1970s and 1980s. Jorge Parodi uses a case study of Metal Empresa, a large Lima factory, to trace the surge and decline of the labor movement in Peru--and in Latin America.

The success or failure of organisations is, in part, dependent on the success or failure of its employees and the relationship that they have with each other. Looking at Employee Relations from an organisational context perspective, this text is designed specifically to cater for the CIPD Employee Relations PDS module and for Employee Relations modules on HR and business degree programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Starting with the question "How have professors and educational institutions responded to pressures to be professional yet act bureaucratically," Philo Hutcheson uses federal and AAUP records and surveys and blends historical research and sociological analysis to develop a full understanding of the problem. With the dramatic expansion of the professoriate following World War II came increasing tensions between the professor's perceived traditional status as an autonomous professional on the one hand and new role as a bureaucrat subject to institutional authority and responsible for departmental and committee assignments on the other. In this increasingly conflicted realm, the AAUP functioned as a key intermediary, dealing with such issues as tenure, salary, contracts, and even faculty strikes.
Hutcheson examines how tensions between the requirements of institutional bureaucracies and the norms of the academic profession resulted in contentiousness and conflict within the national AAUP, between administrators and faculty members on individual campuses, within the ranks of faculties themselves, and even deep in the consciences of many concerned individuals. The book analyzes the association's ability to respond effectively and to balance the values of collegial representation with the powers of collective bargaining. It thus offers a detailed and authoritative examination of the AAUP's search for ways to sustain professionalism while dealing with the fundamental changes in the nature of the professoriate in the post-World War II era.

"Protest and Popular Culture" is at once a historical monograph and a critique of postmodernist approaches to the study of mass media, consumerism, and popular political movements. In it, Triece compares the self-representations of several late nineteenth and twentieth-century women's protest movements with representations of women offered by contemporaneous mass media outlets. She shows that from the late nineteenth century until the present day, U.S. women's protest movements sought to convince women that they are first and foremost laborer/producers, while the U.S. media has just as consistently sought to convince women that they are primarily consumers. Triece contends that these approaches to portraying women have been and continue to be constructed in opposition to one another. The leaders of women's protest movements, she argues, have long sought to convince women not to spend time and money on reshaping their selves through consumer purchases, but instead to focus attention on empowering themselves politically by asserting control over their own labor power. The mass media, meanwhile, has always treated such movements as potential threats to the financial well-being of the consumer sector (that is, of advertisers), and so has consistently trivialized them, while seeking simultaneously to convince women that they should devote attention and resources to buying things, not to struggling to overcome class and gender discrimination. Many cultural-studies scholars have argued that in recent years, rising prosperity has made consumerism into the primary site of both individual expression and "resistance" to the dominant socio-economic order, with self-definition through personal purchases supplanting the role formerly played by struggle for an end to inequities of all kinds. These scholars contend that as such, mass media no longer function to naturalize, and thus reinforce such inequities, and consumerism no longer serves to perpetuate them. Triece argues that her examples show that this argument is faulty, and that scholars should continue to take a traditional materialist view in all studies of mass media, consumerism, and popular protest.

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.

European union movements played a central role in promoting a "European model of society" -- a humane industrial relations system, high labor standards, generous welfare states, and collective political representation -- which reached its pinnacle in the post-World Was II era. The recent shift to lower growth, rising unemployment, renewed European integration, neo-liberalism, and globalization has challenged this "European Model" and the unions' place in it. These essays, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, examine responses of six major European union movements to the dramatic changes in economic and political conditions in the last two decades. They are the result of a group research effort and are based on a common framework which lends it quite an exceptional coherence. Its value is enhanced by the editors' conclusion that reflects upon new union positions and their implications, in particular the most important question of what will happen to the 'European model of society' in consequence.

The essential argument of this book is that the current crisis of US unions ought to be considered in terms of the local context of labor-management relations; that is, the communities in which men and women live and work. Whether by design or necessity, the structure of New Deal national labor legislation has sustained, and maintained, distinctive local labor-management practices. As the economies of American communities (and the world) have become highly interdependent, reflecting the evolution of corporate structure and trade between economies, unions movement can be traced to unions' dependence upon inter-community solidarity, a fragile democratic ideal which is often overwhelmed by economic imperatives operating at higher scales in other places. An important objective of Professor Clark in this work is to demonstrate the significance of the intersection between communities, unions, and institutions, in understanding the prospects for American unionism.

Examining the social and intellectual collision of the American reform tradition with immigrant Marxism during the Reconstruction era, this text charts the rise and fall of the International Workingman's Association (IWA). The IWA's attraction to American reformers (including those involved in women's rights), the effect they had on the American Left, and the reasons behind their ultimate purging from the IWA by more orthodox Marxists are all examined. The ideology and activities of the Yankee Internationalists are also explored, as the author traces the evolution of antebullum American reformers' thinking on questions such as wage labour. Linked to this is the exposition and analysis of how American reformers' priorities of racial and sexual equality clashed with their Marxist partners' strategy of infiltrating the trade union movement. It is argued that, ultimately, Marxist demands for party discipline and ideological unity proved incompatible with the Yankees' innate republicanism. This resulted in the expulsion of the Yankees from the IWA in 1871 and the separation of Marxism from the American reform tradition.

This is the story of the historic 21 week equal pay strike at Trico-Folberth in Brentford, West London, in 1976. TRICO - A Victory to Remember is indispensable to understanding how the 1970s marked a turning point in making women's rights a central focus for the labour movement, casting aside the minor role women were allocated in the mainstream. No longer could women's rights be given mere lip service. The strike was trail-blazing in many ways. It was the first time American-style picket-busting convoys of lorries and scab labour had been used against strikers who were mainly women. The employer, Trico, relied on legal loopholes in the new Equal Pay Act in presenting the case to a tribunal, which was boycotted by the strikers' trade union, the AUEW. However, despite the tribunal ruling in favour of the employer, the union nevertheless successfully negotiated equal pay. This achievement was unique, and led towards the Equal Pay Act being amended in 1983. The story of the strike, illustrated with stunning archive photos mostly unseen for over forty years, charts the women's campaign from its beginnings to their final victory, including anecdotes from some of those involved. There is a brief history of the struggle for equal pay in Britain, and a chapter on the relevance of the Trico dispute to today's society. Author Sally Groves worked at Trico from 1975 - 1980 on assembly and then as a trainee tool setter. She was one of the women on strike in 1976, and became the Trico AUEW Strike Committee's Publicity Officer. This book will inspire women everywhere; trade unionists and anyone suffering as a result of the gig economy. It will be of particular interest to those studying and researching issues of women's equality.

Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace. In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis. The search for a resolution to this crisis led to the formation of an influential coalition of labor Democrats, AFL unionists, and Progressive activists on the eve of U.S. entry into the war. Though the coalition's efforts in pursuit of industrial democracy were eventually frustrated by powerful forces in business and government and by internal rifts within the movement itself, McCartin shows how the shared quest helped cement the ties between unionists and the Democratic Party that would subsequently shape much New Deal legislation and would continue to influence the course of American political and labor history to the present day.

This study explores a tradition of interracial unionism that persisted in the coal fields of Alabama from the dawn of the New South through the turbulent era of World War I. Daniel Letwin focuses on the forces that prompted black and white miners to collaborate in the labor movement even as racial segregation divided them in nearly every other aspect of their lives. Letwin examines a series of labor campaigns--conducted under the banners of the Greenback-Labor party, the Knights of Labor, and, most extensively, the United Mine Workers--whose interracial character came into growing conflict with the southern racial order. This tension gives rise to the book's central question: to what extent could the unifying potential of class withstand the divisive pressure of race? Arguing that interracial unionism in the New South was much more complex and ambiguous than is generally recognized, Letwin offers a story of both promise and failure, as a movement crossing the color line alternately transcended and succumbed to the gathering hegemony of Jim Crow. |This study explores a tradition of interracial unionism that persisted in the coal fields of Alabama from the dawn of the New South through the turbulent era of World War I. Daniel Letwin focuses on the forces that prompted black and white miners to collaborate in the labor movement even as racial segregation divided them in nearly every other aspect of their lives. Letwin offers a story of both promise and failure, as a movement crossing the color line alternately transcended and succumbed to the gathering hegemony of Jim Crow.

The years between 1930 and 1979 witnessed a period of intense labor activity in Latin America as workers participated in strikes, unionization efforts, and populist and revolutionary movements. The ten original essays AEMDNMOin this volume examine sugar mill seizures in Cuba, oil nationalization and railway strikes in Mexico, the attempted revolution in Guatemala, railway nationalization and Peronism in Argentina, Brazil's textile strikes, the Bolivian revolution of 1952, Peru's copper strikes, and the copper nationalization in Chile--all important national events in which industrial laborers played critical roles. Demonstrating an illuminating, bottom-up approach to Latin American labor history, these essays investigate the everyday acts through which workers attempted to assert more control over the work process and thereby add dignity to their lives. Working together, they were able to bring shop floor struggles to public attention and--at certain critical junctures--to influence events on a national scale. The contributors are Andrew Boeger, Michael Marconi Braga, Jonathan C. Brown, Josh DeWind, Marc Christian McLeod, Michael Snodgrass, Andrea Spears, Joanna Swanger, Maria Celina Tuozzo, and Joel Wolfe.

The Welfare and Retirement Fund of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) is widely acknowledged as the most innovative effort at group health care in the United States in the twentieth century. Ivana Krajcinovic describes the establishment, operation, and demise of the Fund that brought mining families from the backwater to the forefront of medical care in less than a decade.

The UMWA was one of the first unions to take advantage of conditions created by World War II to bargain for employer-financed health benefits. Spurning convention, the UMWA not only retained control of health benefits but also utilized then unorthodox managed care principles in arranging for the care of its members. Perhaps even more remarkable, the union designed the Fund to care for a beneficiary group with extremely high demands. Initially poor and neglected, miners were encumbered by the additional health burdens of a hazardous industry.

Krajcinovic analyzes the success of the Fund over nearly three decades in providing high-quality cost-effective care to miners and their families. She also explains the irony of its dismantlement at the very moment when its innovations gained currency among mainstream commercial plans.