A study of the role of unionised workers in Kenya, this places the workers and their unions within the broad context of an evolving political economy. Similar studies, often restricted to a single trade union, have usually focused either on union government relations or on internal union politics. This work is distinguished by its attempt to reveal the interrelation between these two facets of working-class life within a peculiar type of socio-economic environment - a predominantly peasant society governed by an elite committed to a capitalist economic strategy, closely associated with an 'external estate' of foreign interests, intertwined with local business concerns, and deeply involved in clientelist politics. Professor Sandbrook demonstrates that Frantz Fanon's sketch of the role of the unionised workers in an economically dependent former colony is largely correct in its application to Kenya. Top union leaders, drawn from the more privileged occupations, receiving relatively high rewards, and understandably apprehensive of the sanctions wielded by the ruling elite, have generally seen their role as obtaining a larger share of the economic pie for the workers within the capitalist political economy.

This book is an abridgement and translation of Guillermo Lora's five-volume history. It deals with the strengthening and radicalisation of Bolivia's organised labour movement, which culminated in the drastic revolutionary changes of the 1950s. The first half offers a reinterpretation of Bolivian history in the century preceding the revolution, viewed from the perspective of the working class. The second half discusses in more detail the major political events and doctrinal issues of a period in which the author, as secretary of the Trotskyist Partido Obrero Revolucionario, himself frequently played an active part. Despite the radical upheaval that occurred in the fifties and the mobilisation of broad sectors of the population around such radical objectives as direct property seizures, union-nominated ministers and union, military and worker control, the labour movement was unable to maintain its conquests in the 1960s. The concluding chapters describe the period of renewed military repression and the continuing efforts of the labour movement to resist.

The book concerns the Soviet effort during the 1920s to make contact with - and if possible revolutionize - the European labour movement, by first establishing a special relationship with the British Trades Union Congress. The ultimate failure of that effort, after the collapse of the general strike in 1926, inspired Trotsky to try one last time to oust Stalin, a confrontation that led to utter collapse of the Trotskyite opposition in 1927 28. The author suggests the failure of this particular 'united front' effort was a major factor in the sectarianism and isolationism of the Communist movement from 1928 to 1934, and thus had a significant affect on the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

In the twentieth century's first decades, U.S. workers waged an epic struggle to achieve security through unions; simultaneously Americans came to interpret current events through newspaper photographs. Eyes on Labor brings these two revolutions together, revealing how news photography brought workers into the nation's mainstream. Carol Quirke focuses on images ignored by scholars but seen by millions of Americans in the news of the day. Part visual analysis, part labor and cultural history, Quirke analyzes over one hundred photographs: stereographs of the Uprising of 1877, tabloid photos of the 1919 strike wave, photo-essays in the nationally popular LIFE Magazine, and even photos taken by a union camera club. Quirke anchors her interpretations in a lively historical narrative that takes readers from Washington D.C. hearings, to small towns in Indiana and Pennsylvania, to local union halls and to New York City boardrooms. Illuminating why unions, employers, and news publishers vied to represent workers with the camera's eye, Eyes on Labor explores how Americans understood the complex and contradictory portrait of labor they produced.

The incidence of industrial conflict and the nature of workplace industrial relations have occupied a central place in public and academic commentary on British society. Debate about the role of the trade unions in the state, the degree of authority that the unions can and should exercise over their members, the desirability of a legal framework for collective agreements, the nature of rank and file militancy and the means and techniques of re-establishing employers' authority over the work in the face of an expanded workers' frontier of control all lie at the heart of the social crisis that marked British society from the end of the 1960s.

This is a study of industrial unrest in the cotton industry at a time when the economy was on the threshold of mid-Victorian prosperity, and when Chartism was still much more than a memory. The town of Preston was the crucial battlefield, and here the masters and men fought out a bitter trial of strength. The strike of 1853-54 closed the Preston cotton industry for seven months, and disrupted production in many other towns in Lancashire. Against the implacable opposition of the masters, the strikers toured the country to organize support, and raised GBP100,000 in subscriptions from their fellow operatives. The dispute featured prominently in the national and provincial press, and the weavers' delegates, notably George Cowell and Mortimer Grimshaw, became celebrities overnight. After five months, the employers brought in blackleg labour, and when the detested `knobsticks' failed to break the strike they had the operatives' leaders arrested. These moves did not deter the cotton workers, who were forced back to work only when their financial reserves were exhausted. Their campaign ended defiantly, as it had begun, with cries of `Ten Per Cent still, and no surrender'. This book is their story.

Why has the Egyptian state, which is more repressive and authoritarian than its Mexican counterpart, been unable to overcome the opposition of a labor movement that is smaller, less organized, and more repressed than the Mexican labor movement? Through agitation or the threat of agitation, Egyptian workers have been able to hinder the reform process, while the Mexican labor movement, which is larger and better organized, was unable to resist privatization. The Egyptian state's low capacity and isolation is best understood by looking at the founding moment - or incorporation period - of each regime. The critical distinction between Mexican and Egyptian incorporation is that in Egypt, the labor movement was depoliticized and attached to the state bureaucracy, while in Mexico, workers were electorally mobilized into a political party. This difference would prove crucial during the reform process because social control in Mexico, exercised through the PRI, was more effective in coopting opponents and mobilizing urban constituencies for privatization than the control mechanisms of the Egyptian state bureaucracy.

This book offers a novel examination of the relations, actions, and practices of healthcare workers, analysed in terms of collective mobilisation. Based on successive surveys conducted over a twenty-year period in public and private hospitals, it brings a rich new conceptualisation of both social movements and care work. We’ve all witnessed the collective mobilisation at play in hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. In such a structured, hierarchical environment, the parallel with social movements highlights the ethical and collective dimensions of care work, as well as the bonds of solidarity and identification with the collective. Yet, healthcare workers are often caught in a dilemma between fighting against underfunding and deteriorating working conditions on the one hand, and cooperating to keep the system standing and provide the best care possible for patients on the other. The author's approach in terms of consensual and conflictual mobilisations brings a fresh theoretical and empirical contribution to the literature on social movements, medical sociology, public health, and the sociology of labour, whilst in-depth case studies bring to light the experiences of healthcare workers and enrich the narrative throughout.

Combating climate change will increasingly impact on production industries and the workers they employ as production changes and consumption is targeted. Yet research has largely ignored labour and its responses. This book brings together sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, economists, and representatives from international and local unions based in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Together they open up a new area of research: Environmental Labour Studies.

The authors ask what kind of environmental policies are unions in different countries and sectors developing. How do they aim to reconcile the protection of jobs with the protection of the environment? What are the forms of cooperation developing between trade unions and environmental movements, especially the so-called Red-Green alliances? Under what conditions are unions striving to create climate change policies that transcend the economic system? Where are they trying to find solutions that they see as possible within the present socio-economic conditions? What are the theoretical and practical implications of trade unions "Just Transition," and the problems and perspectives of "Green Jobs"? The authors also explore how food workers rights would contribute to low carbon agriculture, the role workers identities play in union climate change policies, and the difficulties of creating solidarity between unions across the global North and South.

Trade Unions in the Green Economy opens the climate change debate to academics and trade unionists from a range of disciplines in the fields of labour studies, environmental politics, environmental management, and climate change policy. It will also be useful for environmental organisations, trade unions, business, and politicians.

The exceptional experiences of South Korea and Taiwan in combining high growth and liberal democracy in a relatively short and similar timetable have brought scholarly attention to their economic and political transformations. This new work looks specifically at the operation of workers and unions in the decades since labor-repressive authoritarian rule ended, bringing Taiwan, in particular, into the literature on comparative labor politics.
South Korean labor unions are commonly described as militant and confrontational, for they often take to the streets in raucous protest. Taiwanese unions are seen as moderate and practical, primarily working through formal political processes to lobby their agendas. In exploring how and why these post-democratization states have come to breed such different types of labor politics, Yoonkyung Lee traces the roots of their differences to how unions and political parties operated under authoritarianism, and points to ways in which those legacies continue to be perpetuated. By pairing two cases with many similarities, Lee persuasively uncovers factors that explain the significant variation at play.

Trade Unions and Workplace Training examines the changing role of trade unions in the provision of vocational education, workplace training and skill development. It reflects upon: the role that unions have played in the reform of vocational education and training systems; the nature of union involvement in consultative mechanisms at a national and industry level; the nature of union involvement in skill formation at the workplace; and the development of mechanisms for the articulation of employee voice in the design, delivery and assessment of vocational training.

The book provides a collection of studies of Canada, Australia, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Norway by leading researchers in the field. Distinctive, accessible and original, all the chapters are written in a style that illustrates the relevance of academic debates and research data to practice and the book includes a number of the chapters written by trade union practitioners.

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.

"Employee-organization relationship" is an overarching term that describes the relationship between the employee and the organization. It encompasses psychological contracts, perceived organizational support, and the employment relationship. Remarkable progress has been made in the last 30 years in the study of EOR. This volume, by a stellar list of international contributors, offers perspectives on EOR that will be of interest to scholars, practitioners and graduate students in IO psychology, business and human resource management.

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 labor 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.

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.

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.

Intelligent and Honest Radicals explores the Chicago labor movement's relationship to Illinois legal and political system especially as seen through the eyes of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). Newton-Matza focuses on the significant era between the great strike in 1919 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration and the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. He brings to light a number of victories and achievements for the labor movement in this period that are often overlooked. Newton-Matza shows the Chicago labor movement as a progressive agency intent on changing the workers' world through words and peaceful actions, drawing upon their personal experiences and ideology.

Law and practice in the field of industrial action and trade union recognition has undergone extensive changes in recent years. The third edition of The Law of Industrial Action and Trade Union Recognition provides a new, up-to-date, and thorough analysis of this technical area of law. This edition offers comprehensive coverage of all aspects of bringing and defending recognition claims and industrial action injunctions to ensure that nothing is missed when planning a case. It includes full coverage of trade union recognition, employment protection rights, deductions from pay, and the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on strikes and picketing. New chapters on Leverage Campaigns and Ancillary Protest cover the new forms of industrial action that have appeared in recent years. The book contains step-by-step guidance and forms and precedents to assist practitioners when negotiating and drafting documents. It covers all recent case law including cases from the European Court of Human Rights and decisions from the Central Arbitration Committee. Written by a team of expert barristers, it provides an essential source of reference to all involved in this area.

This book explores the precarious margins of contemporary labor markets. Over the last few decades, there has been much discussion of a shift from full-time permanent jobs to higher levels of part-time and temporary employment and self-employment. Despite such attention, regulatory approaches have not adapted accordingly. Instead, in the absence of genuine alternatives, old regulatory models are applied to new labour market realities, leaving the most precarious forms of employment intact. The book places this disjuncture in historical context and focuses on its implications for workers most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrants, using illustrations from Australia, the United States, and Canada, as well as member states of the European Union.
Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis of national and international regulatory approaches, drawing on original and extensive qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analyzing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries.

The miners' lockout of 1926 was a pivotal moment in British twentieth-century history. Opening with the heady days of the general strike, it continued for seven months and affected one million miners. In County Durham, where almost three in every ten adult men worked in the coal industry, its impact was profound.
Hester Barron explores the way that the lockout was experienced by Durham's miners and their families. She investigates collective values and behavior, focusing particularly on the tensions between identities based around class and occupation, and the rival identities that could cut across the creation of a cohesive community. Highlighting the continuing importance of differences due to gender, age, religion, poverty, and individual hopes and aspirations, she nevertheless finds that in 1926, despite such differences, the Durham coalfield continued to display the solidarity for which miners were famed.
In response, Barron argues that the very concept of the "mining community" needs to be reassessed. Rather than consisting of an homogeneous occupational identity, she suggests that the essence of community lay in its ability to subsume and integrate other categories of identity. A collective consciousness was further grounded in a shared historical narrative that had to be continually reinforced.
It was the strength of such local solidarities that enabled both an exemplary regional response to the strike, and the ability to conceptualize such action within the wider framework of the national union. The 1926 Miners' Lockout provides crucial insights into issues of collective identity and collective action, illuminating wider debates about solidarity and fragmentation within working-class communities and cultures.

The Commonwealth of Australia was federated in 1901. Only three short years later the Federal Government established a court system to arbitrate over industrial disputes in a young country that already had a history of half a century of organised labour. This 2004 book is a thematic history of an important Australian institution, the federal conciliation and arbitration system, on the occasion of its centenary. The various chapters written by leading scholars deal with the system's political history, the work of the tribunal, the legal framework, economic and social effects, the effects on indigenous and women workers, the role of employers associations and unions, and the management of industrial conflict. It is a story rich in drama involving strikes, lockouts, imprisonment of union officials, noisy protests in courtrooms and in the streets, momentous High Court judgements, and the rise and fall of governments.

The 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis triggered dramatic changes in European labour relations. Unemployment and precariousness increased considerably. This was further exacerbated by austerity measures, leading to declining minimum wages and layoffs in the public sector. These structural changes varied considerably by country but collectively pose challenges to organized labour as they confront neoliberal restructuring. Concurrently, recent social struggles continue to develop with unemployed and precarious workers playing a major role as protest actors. Focusing on the triangular relationship of precariousness, trade unions and social movements, this book draws on a range of exciting cases, both comparative and country case studies, in order to understand how the shadow of the crisis still haunts organized labour in Europe. The chapters in this collection each offer a unique perspective on how the results of the crisis, in Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, are leading to a variety of new social movements as a consequence of increased precariousness and also how trade unions are attempting to respond.

In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not onlyupdates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.

As Canada's most industrialised province, Ontario served as the regional centre of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an organisation which embodied a late nineteenth-century working-class vision of an alternative to the developing industrial-capitalist society. The Order opposed the exploitation of labor, and cultivated working-class unity by providing an institutional and cultural rallying point for North American workers. By 1886 thousands of industrial workers had enrolled within the ranks of Ontario's local and district assemblies. This book examines the rise and fall of the Order, providing case studies of its experience in Toronto and Hamilton and chronicling its impact across the province.