Widely used since the mid-twentieth century, GDP (gross domestic product) has become the world's most powerful statistical indicator of national development and progress. Practically all governments adhere to the idea that GDP growth is a primary economic target, and while criticism of this measure has grown, neither its champions nor its detractors deny its central importance in our political culture. In The Power of a Single Number, Philipp Lepenies recounts the lively history of GDP's political acceptance-and eventual dominance. Locating the origins of GDP measurements in Renaissance England, Lepenies explores the social and political factors that originally hindered its use. It was not until the early 1900s that an ingenuous lone-wolf economist revived and honed GDP's statistical approach. These ideas were then extended by John Maynard Keynes, and a more focused study of national income was born. American economists furthered this work by emphasizing GDP's ties to social well-being, setting the stage for its ascent. GDP finally achieved its singular status during World War II, assuming the importance it retains today. Lepenies's absorbing account helps us understand the personalities and popular events that propelled GDP to supremacy and clarifies current debates over the wisdom of the number's rule.

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.

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.

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.

The revival of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is all the more welcome for having followed one of the worst economic disasters-a quarter century of economic malaise for most of the region-since the industrial revolution. Six of the world's fastest-growing economies in the first decade of this century were African. Yet only in Ethiopia and Rwanda was growth not based on resources and the rising price of oil. Deindustrialization has yet to be reversed, and progress toward creating a modern economy remains limited. This book explores the vital role that active government policies can play in transforming African economies. Such policies pertain not just to industry. They traverse all economic sectors, including finance, information technology, and agriculture. These packages of learning, industrial, and technology (LIT) policies aim to bring vigorous and lasting growth to the region. This collection features case studies of LIT policies in action in many parts of the world, examining their risks and rewards and what they mean for Sub-Saharan Africa.

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.

From grassroots to global activism, the untold story of the world's first domestic workers' movement. Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often 'off the books,' working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in the growing informal global economy. Drawing on over a decade's worth of research, plus interviews with a number of key movement leaders and domestic workers, Jennifer N. Fish presents the compelling stories of the pioneering women who, while struggling to fight for rights in their own countries, mobilized transnationally to enact change. The book takes us to Geneva, where domestic workers organized, negotiated, and successfully received the first-ever granting of international standards for care work protections by the United Nations' International Labour Organization. This landmark victory not only legitimizes the importance of these household laborers' demands for respect and recognition, but also signals the need to consider human rights as a central component of workers' rights. Domestic Workers of the World Unite! chronicles how a group with so few resources could organize and act within the world's most powerful international structures and give voice to the wider global plight of migrants, women, and informal workers. For anyone with a stake in international human and workers' rights, this is a critical and inspiring model of civil society organizing.

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.

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.

Collective bargaining is the main vehicle for labour worldwide to negotiate wages, benefits, retirement policies, training and other terms of working with management in both the public and private sectors. Labour economists have long been active in modelling the relations between collective bargaining agreements, labour markets and social welfare conditions. This book presents a theoretical model of unions which offers a unified treatment of the centralisation of bargaining, the credibility of labour contracts, the unionisation of labour markets and the relative bargaining power of the union. Tapio Palokangas develops the microfoundations of bargaining and examines collective bargaining interacting with public policy, investment and growth, and international trade and specialisation. In conclusion Professor Palokangas challenges the commonly held view that collective bargaining has a negative impact on economics welfare, and argues that with the existence of market failure, collective bargaining can be welfare enhancing.

First published in 1981, this book, a political history of organised labour in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s, broke ground in research on the Japanese socialist movement by examining the movement from the perspective of the unions, which then provided the socialist parties with much of their popular support. Focusing on the Japan General Federation of Labour, an important pacesetter for labour politics, the author analyses why a significant cross-section of organised workers began the 1920s with promising vitality and high hopes of contributing to a progressive, socialist reconstruction of Japan, only to abandon this political commitment in the 1930s, with adverse consequences both for the unions and for their political party allies. Throughout, the author assesses Japanese and Western interpretations of Japanese society and politics in seeking a balanced understanding of the dynamics and significance of popular social protest in the critical interwar decades.