This volume identifies empirical sites and methodological frames for approaching the construction of migration as a public problem. Starting from the premise that transnationalism becomes structural in setting the public agenda, the authors explore topics and arguments on migration in media and political discourses, as well as the ways migrants and non-migrants recontextualize these discourses in the process of making sense of migration, as a matter of citizenship and policy action.

In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to comply with the demands of globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers' rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility?the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed?which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment. Showing how flexibilization and other processes have undermined organized labor in all of these countries, these in-depth case studies reveal the current internal fragmentation of unions and their inability to promote counterreforms or to increase collective bargaining. This assessment concludes that even with substantial variation among countries in how reforms have been implemented, most workers in the region have experienced increasing precarity, informal employment, and weaker labor movements. This book provides vital insights into whether these movements have the potential to regain influence and represent working people's interests effectively in the future.

The story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a better place. Ernest Thompson dedicated his life to organizing the powerless. This lively, illustrated personal narrative of his work shows the great contribution that people's coalitions can make to the struggle for equality and freedom. Thompson cut his teeth organizing one of the great industrial unions, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and brought his organizing skills and commitment to coalition building to Orange, New Jersey. He built a strong organization and skillfully led fights for school desegregation, black political representation, and strong government in a city he initially thought of as a "dirty Jim Crow town going nowhere." Thompson came to love the City of Orange and its caring citizens, seeing in its struggles a microcosm of America. This story of people's power is meant for all who struggle for human rights, economic opportunity, decent housing, effective education, and a chance for children to have a better life. Ernest Thompson (1906-1971) grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, on a farm that had been given to his family at the end of the Civil War. The family was very poor and oppressed by racist practices. Thompson was determined to get away and to obtain power. He migrated to Jersey City, where he became part of the union organizing movement that built the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). He became the first African American to hold a fulltime organizing position with his union, the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). He eventually headed UE's innovative Fair Employment Practices program and fought for equal rights and pay for women and minority workers. Thompson also helped build the National Negro Labor Council, 1951-1956, and served as its director of organizing. In 1956, under the onslaught of the McCarthy era, UE was split in two, and Thompson lost his job. His wife, Margaret Thompson, brought the local school segregation to his attention. Ernie "Home" Thompson organized to desegregate the regional schools, building strong coalitions and political power for the black community that ultimately served all the people of Orange.

A sweeping history of the full range of human labor Few authors are able to write cogently in both the scientific and the economic spheres. Even fewer possess the intellectual scope needed to address science and economics at a macro as well as a micro level. But Paul Cockshott, using the dual lenses of Marxist economics and technological advance, has managed to pull off a stunningly acute critical perspective of human history, from pre-agricultural societies to the present. In How the World Works, Cockshott connects scientific, economic, and societal strands to produce a sweeping and detailed work of historical analysis. This book will astound readers of all backgrounds and ages; it will also will engage scholars of history, science, and economics for years to come.

While workers movements have been largely phased out and considered out-dated in most parts of the world during the 1990s, the 21st century has seen a surge in new and unprecedented forms of strikes and workers organisations. The collection of essays in this book, spanning countries across global South and North, provides an account of strikes and working class resistance in the 21st century. Through original case studies, the book looks at the various shades of workers' movements, analysing different forms of popular organisation as responses to new social and economic conditions, such as restructuring of work and new areas of investment.

This open access book discusses transnational trade union cooperation in Europe - its forms, focuses, conditions, and obstacles. It provides an overview of existing trade union cooperation and includes detailed analyses of two specific questions: the debates on statutory minimum wages and the Posting of Workers Directive. Drawing on empirical research, the authors take a comparative approach, considering national industrial relations regimes as well as individual sectors. With the ongoing processes of integration in Europe, it has become increasingly important for unions to cooperate with regard to employers and EU institutions. The authors illustrate the interconnections between national and European industrial relations, and explore the process of European integration in labour markets. Illustrating the potential for and difficulties involved in deepening trade union cooperation across Europe, this work is a vital read for trade unionists, researchers and students interested in European trade unionism and labour markets.

Originally published in 1928, this book was written to provide members of the National Union of Teachers with a souvenir upon the occasion of their 1928 conference, which took place in Cambridge during the Easter vacation. It presents a concise guide to the city, with information on the history of the university and other areas. Illustrative figures are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the National Union of Teachers and the history of Cambridge.

In Inside China's Automobile Factories, Lu Zhang explores the current conditions, subjectivity, and collective actions of autoworkers in the world's largest and fastest-growing automobile manufacturing nation. Based on years of fieldwork and extensive interviews conducted at seven large auto factories in various regions of China, Zhang provides an inside look at the daily factory life of autoworkers and a deeper understanding of the roots of rising labor unrest in the auto industry. Combining original empirical data and sophisticated analysis that moves from the shop floor to national political economy and global industry dynamics, the book develops a multilayered framework for understanding how labor relations in the auto industry and broader social economy can be expected to develop in China in the coming decades.

Most existing theoretical approaches to industrial relations and human resources management (IR/HRM) build their analyses and policy prescriptions on one of two foundational assumptions. They assume either that conflict between workers and employers is the natural and inevitable state of affairs; or that under normal circumstances, cooperation is what employers can and should expect from workers. By contrast, A New Theory of Industrial Relations: People, Markets and Organizations after Neoliberalism proposes a theoretical framework for IR/HRM that treats the existence of conflict or cooperation at work as an outcome that needs to be explained rather than an initial presupposition. By identifying the social and organizational roots of reasoned, positively chosen cooperation at work, this framework shows what is needed to construct a genuinely consensual form of capitalism. In broader terms, the book offers a critical theory of the governance of work under capitalism. 'The governance of work' refers to the structures of incentives and sanctions, authority, accountability and direct and representative participation within and beyond the workplace by which decisions about the content, conditions and remuneration of work are made, applied, challenged and revised. The most basic proposition made in the book is that work will be consensual-and, hence, that employees will actively and willingly cooperate with the implementation of organizational plans and strategies-when the governance of work is substantively legitimate. Although stable configurations of economic and organizational structures are possible in the context of a bare procedural legitimacy, it is only where work relationships are recognized as right and just that positive forms of cooperation will occur. The analytic purpose of the theory is to specify the conditions under which substantive legitimacy will arise. Drawing in particular on the work of Alan Fox, Robert Cox and Jurgen Habermas, the book argues that whether workers fight against, tolerate or willingly accept the web of relationships that constitutes the organization depends on the interplay between three empirically variable factors: the objective day-to-day experience of incentives, constraints and obligations at work; the subjective understanding of work as a social relationship; and the formal institutional structure of policies, rules and practices by which relationships at work are governed.

After many years of indifferent decline, trade union membership is now being revitalised. Strategies known as union organizing are being used to recruit and re-energize unions around the globe. This book considers exactly how trade unions are working to do this and provides a much needed evaluation of these rebuilding strategies.
By comparing historical and contemporary case-studies to assess the impact of various organizing campaigns, Union Organizing assesses the progress of unions across Europe and America. It raises key debates about the organizing culture and considers the impact of recent union recognition laws on employers and the government's Fairness at Work policy.

Since the 1980s, the world's governments have decreased state welfare and thus increased the number of unprotected 'informal' or 'precarious' workers. As a result, more and more workers do not receive secure wages or benefits from either employers or the state. This book offers a fresh and provocative look into the alternative social movements informal workers in India are launching. It also offers a unique analysis of the conditions under which these movements succeed or fail. Drawing from 300 interviews with informal workers, government officials and union leaders, Rina Agarwala argues that Indian informal workers are using their power as voters to demand welfare benefits from the state, rather than demanding traditional work benefits from employers. In addition, they are organizing at the neighborhood level, rather than the shop floor, and appealing to 'citizenship', rather than labor rights.

This thought-provoking study argues for a restoration of the classical Marxist position linking the development process, class formation, and class capacities; in practical terms it argues for a restoration of strategies premised on a dialectical understanding of capitalism that sees the process of proletarianization as a capacity-enhancing one rather than a capacity-eroding one. Lembcke adopts Therborn's position that the fundamental power resource available to the working class is its capacity for unity through mutually supported and concerted practices, and that this capacity is rooted in the organizational structure. His work synthesizes three major areas of thought on the subject, including the work in logics of collective action (Offe and Wiesenthal), studies of class formation (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich) and class capacities (Therborn), and organizational studies done within the strategic choices framework (Cornfield).

Historians have characterized the open-shop movement of the early twentieth century as a cynical attempt by business to undercut the labor movement by twisting the American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency to their own ends. The precursors to today's right-to-work movement, advocates of the open shop in the Progressive Era argued that honest workers should have the right to choose whether or not to join a union free from all pressure. At the same time, business owners systematically prevented unionization in their workplaces. While most scholars portray union opponents as knee-jerk conservatives, Chad Pearson demonstrates that many open-shop proponents identified themselves as progressive reformers and benevolent guardians of America's economic and political institutions. By exploring the ways in which employers and their allies in journalism, law, politics, and religion drew attention to the reformist, rather than repressive, character of the open-shop movement, Pearson's book forces us to consider the origins, character, and limitations of this movement in new ways. Throughout his study, Pearson describes class tensions, noting that open-shop campaigns primarily benefited management and the nation's most economically privileged members at the expense of ordinary people. Pearson's analysis of archives, trade journals, newspapers, speeches, and other primary sources elucidates the mentalities of his subjects and their times, rediscovering forgotten leaders and offering fresh perspectives on well-known figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Booker T. Washington and George Creel. Reform or Repression sheds light on businessmen who viewed strong urban-based employers' and citizens' associations, weak unions, and managerial benevolence as the key to their own, as well as the nation's, progress and prosperity.

A Handbook of Dispute Resolution examines the theoretical and practical developments that are transforming the practice of lawyers and other professionals engaged in settling disputes, grievance-handling and litigation. The book explains what distinguishes ADR from other forms of dispute resolution and examines the role ADR can play in a range of contexts where litigation would once have been the only option, such as family law and company law. In some areas, like industrial relations, ADR is not an alternative, but the main method of conflict-intervention, and several contributors draw on their experience of negotiating between management and unions. A wide variety of methods is open to the non-litigious, including resort to Ombudsmen, negotiation, small claims courts and mini-trials; these and other options receive detailed attention. Given the newness of ADR as a discipline, questions about the training of mediators and about the role of central government have not yet been resolved. The final section of the book is devoted to discussion of these issues. Case studies are drawn from the international arena - examples from China, Canada, Australia, Germany and North America place ADR in a cultural and historical perspective.

In the public imagination, Silicon Valley embodies the newest of the new-the cutting edge, the forefront of our social networks and our globally interconnected lives. But the pressures exerted on many of today's communications tech workers mirror those of a much earlier generation of laborers in a very different space: the London workforce that helped launch and shape the massive telecommunications systems operating at the turn of the twentieth century. As the Victorian age ended, affluent Britons came to rely on information exchanged along telegraph and telephone wires for seamless communication: an efficient and impersonal mode of sharing thoughts, demands, and desires. This embrace of seemingly unmediated communication obscured the labor involved in the smooth operation of the network, much as our reliance on social media and app interfaces does today. Serving a Wired World is a history of information service work embedded in the daily maintenance of liberal Britain and the status quo in the early years of the twentieth century. As Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, the administrators and engineers who crafted these telecommunications systems created networks according to conventional gender perceptions and social hierarchies, modeling the operation of the networks on the dynamic between master and servant. Despite attempts to render telegraphists and telephone operators invisible, these workers were quite aware of their crucial role in modern life, and they posed creative challenges to their marginalized status-from organizing labor strikes to participating in deviant sexual exchanges. In unexpected ways, these workers turned a flatly neutral telecommunications network into a revolutionary one, challenging the status quo in ways familiar today.

The Miners' Unions of Northumberland and Durham by the historian Edward Welbourne was first published in 1923. It was based on a study which had previously been awarded the Thirlwall Prize, the Seeley Medal for History, and the Gladstone Prize in the year 1921 at the University of Cambridge. The book presents an historical analysis of the charged social conditions and conflicts that shaped the coal mining industry in the north of England from the middle of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century.

Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847 1903), writer and social reformer, rose to prominence as one of America's first muckraker journalists. Born in New York City, Lloyd started his journalism career at the Chicago Tribune and went on to expose the abuse of power in American oil companies. He also pursued a career in politics. In 1899 he travelled to New Zealand and Australia, the 'political laboratories' of Great Britain, to investigate how they resolved the conflict between organised capital and organised labour, and how they promoted social welfare. This book, published in 1900, praises New Zealand's system of compulsory arbitration and describes many instances of successful dispute resolution, from clothing manufacture to newspaper typesetting. The book includes an introduction by William Pember Reeves (1857 1932), liberal newspaper editor and writer, who as New Zealand's minister of labour had brought in the Arbitration Act of 1894 and other important labour legislation."

Union organizer and balladeer Ella May became a martyr for workers nationwide when she was murdered on her way to a union meeting in Gastonia, North Carolina, at age 28. A mother of nine and bookkeeper for the communist-led National Textile Workers Union, May worked to organize fellow mill workers in Gaston County. Her efforts to organize black workers--along with her brash, outspoken manner--incensed the local community and she was shot by an anti-union vigilante group on September 14, 1929. Written by her great-granddaughter, this book tells Ella May's story, including her involvement in the Loray Mill Strike, the largest communist-led strike on American soil. Her most famous ballad, ""Mill Mother's Lament,"" reveals her motivation: ""It is for our little children.

When NAFTA went into effect in 1994, many feared it would intensify animosity among North American unions, lead to the scapegoating of Mexican workers and immigrants, and eclipse any possibility for cross-border labor cooperation. But far from polarizing workers, NAFTA unexpectedly helped stimulate labor transnationalism among key North American unions and erode union policies and discourses rooted in racism. The emergence of labor transnationalism in North America presents compelling political and sociological puzzles: how did NAFTA, the concrete manifestation of globalization processes in North America, help deepen labor solidarity on the continent? In addition to making the provocative argument that global governance institutions can play a pivotal role in the development of transnational social movements, this book suggests that globalization need not undermine labor movements: collectively, unions can help shape how the rules governing the global economy are made.

Combining the control theory of William Glasser with the wisdom of W. Edwards Deming, this indispensable management resource explains both what quality is and what lead-managers need to do to achieve it.

Teacher unions and their members have long stood as polarizing figures in a vast educational landscape. As in the Western films of the 1920s, policymakers, education reformers, and onlookers often assign union leaders and the teachers they represent either the white hats of heroes or the black hats of villains. Politicized efforts to reductively classify teacher unions as beneficial or dangerous have only served to obscure the extent to which labor militancy and teacher activism have become part and parcel of the American public school system and the primary mechanisms by which teachers' voices are heard - and heeded - in the policy arena. Teacher unions have grown in tandem with and in response to the expansion of the school bureaucracy and the acceleration of accountability reforms, and teachers' calls for recognition and reform are inseparable from broader movements for social change. Far more than either good or bad, teacher unions are the inevitable outgrowth of American public education as it stands today. This book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the state of modern teacher unions, the complex spaces they operate in, and the connections between militancy, activism, and school reform. Breaking free from the white hat/black hat dyad that has for so long colored the lenses we use to understand unions, the chapters of this book engage a set of fundamental questions: Where did the modern moment of militancy come from, and in what ways is it a continuation or a departure from the approaches of previous organized teachers?; What is at stake in modern expressions of militancy for teachers, communities, and schools?; Beyond the flashpoint of the walkout, what is the effect of teacher activism?

The most controversial aspect of institutional regeneration in North America and Europe has been the restructuring of labour relations. Media attention has been drawn to the resulting claims of excess employer power: however, supporters of union reform point to the spate of strikes in Western Europe as the predicament that the UK has escaped. In this book, Martyn Wright examines how competitive crisis affected the management of work relations in Britain between 1979 and 1991. Using longitudinal analysis and a wealth of case study material from companies and employers associations, the study moves beyond the normal cross-sectional survey to reveal a complex pattern of procedural and substantive rule change, and illustrates considerable variation in the context to which competitive crisis was harnessed by employers to generate an ongoing momentum for change. Managing Competitive Crisis is a must for students of organisational change.

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.