View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

aI am not aware of a book that covers the same ground as this one--let alone one that does so using such thorough research and with such technical competence.a
Anthony M. Gould, Universite Laval

"Jacobs offers a history of the federal government's efforts to curb labor racketeering. The heart of his text focuses on the results achieved by employing Civil RICO suits to weed out organized crime from unions long mired in corruption. The Justice Department has mounted twenty such efforts since 1982, and Jacobs's book is the first to provide a comprehensive assessment of this controversial tactic. He tackles this ambitious project with a combination of detailed research, clear writing, and judicious consideration, all of which have been a hallmark of his previous texts on corruption and organized crime. The result is a must read book for anyone interested in the problem of union corruption and what to do about it."
--"Industrial and Labor Relations Review"

"Jacobs, legal scholar and expert on the Mafia, sets out to show how the Mob has distorted American labor history, explaining the relationship between organized crime and organized labor, as well as recent federal efforts to clean up unions"
--"Booklist"

"James Jacobs, a New York University law professor and author of Mobsters, Unions and Feds, says Mafiosi were hired by union organizers in the early twentieth century to combat company toughs. Now, he says, they specialize in 'selling the rights of workers.'"
--"USA Today"

"Jacobs further burnishes his reputation for advancing the study of organized crime in America with his latest work of scholarship, billed by the publisher as 'the only book to investigate how the mob has distorted American labor history.' This worthy successor to "Gotham Unbound" and "Busting the Mob" is an exhaustive, albeit sometimes repetitive, survey of the grip La Cosa Nostra has exerted on the country's most powerful unions. While many will be familiar with the broad outlines of the corruption that riddled the Teamsters, which is recounted by the author, his summary of some lesser-known examples of pervasive labor corruption help illustrate his thesis that the entire American union movement has suffered from the intimidation and fear the mob used to gain and maintain control of unions. Especially valuable is Jacobs's examination of the relatively recent use of the RICO law to bring dirty unions under the control of a federally appointed independent trustee, and the book's posing of hard questions about the mixed success those monitorships have had."
--"Publishers Weekly"

"Jacobs has covered a wide range of legal issues, including such hot-button topics as hate crime laws and gun control, but he always returns to the world of mobsters and the men and women who investigate, prosecute, and sentence them."
--"NYU Today"

"James Jacobs brilliantly documents and analyzes a remarkable and untold chapter in the history of American law enforcement. This groundbreaking book should be a starting point for officials around the world who confront powerful organized crime groups."
--Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York and former Director, National Institute of Justice

"A pathbreaking work. For 50 years, organized crime has been the elephant inorganized labor's living room, unacknowledged and unexplained. Jacobs has critically analyzed every facet of this apparently intractable problem--from its roots to the federal government's various efforts to challenge organized crime's influence. From this point forward, no one can think critically about this problem without relying on Jacobs' work."
--Robert Luskin, General Executive Board Attorney, Laborers' International Union of North America

"Jacobs presents a near encyclopedic account of the Mafia's infiltration, control and exploitation of four major national unions and a number of large local unions. It is a sordid frightening story of violence, corruption and oppression, the betrayal of union members and extortion of employers, defiance of the law and disregard for human decency. This disturbing story should be required reading for all who seek strong and more democratic unions, all who would protect the rights of workers, and all who are concerned for the health of our political and social processes."
--Clyde Summers, Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Law School

"A fabulous and fascinating book. Jacobs demonstrates the continuing impact of organized crime on the American union movement, and details the legal mechanisms developed in recent years to combat mob influence. History has come home to haunt us, and Jacobs makes the case for using law to fight against the mob for union democracy."
--Stanley N. Katz, Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

"Jacobs demonstrates that while it has been remarkably difficult to defeat labor racketeering, much has been achieved. This will be welcomenews to all who root for the revitalization of the labor movement."
--Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, Cornell University

Nowhere in the world has organized crime infiltrated the labor movement as effectively as in the United States. Yet the government, the AFL-CIO, and the civil liberties community all but ignored the situation for most of the twentieth century. Since 1975, however, the FBI, Department of Justice, and the federal judiciary have relentlessly battled against labor racketeering, even in some of the nation's most powerful unions.

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the first book to document organized crime's exploitation of organized labor and the massive federal clean-up effort. A renown criminologist who for twenty years has been assessing the government's attack on the Mafia, James B. Jacobs explains how Cosa Nostra families first gained a foothold in the labor movement, then consolidated their power through patronage, fraud, and violence and finally used this power to become part of the political and economic power structure of 20th century urban America.

Since FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, federal law enforcement has aggressively investigated and prosecuted labor racketeers, as well as utilized the civil remedies provided for by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute to impose long-term court-supervised remedial trusteeships on mobbed-up unions. There have been some impressive victories, including substantial progress toward liberating the four most racketeer-ridden national unions from the grip of organized crime, but victory cannot yet be claimed.

The only book to investigate how the mob has exploited the American labor movement, Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the most comprehensive study to date of how labor racketeering evolved and how the government has finally resolved to eradicate it.

From assembly line to call centre, this volume charts the immense transformation of work and pay across the 20th century and provides the first labour focused history of Britain. Written by leading British historians and economists, each chapter stands as a self-contained reading for those who need an overview of the topic, as well as an introduction to and analysis of the controversies among scholars for readers entering or refreshing deeper study.
The 20th century was a period of unrivalled change in the British labour market. Technology, social movements, and political action all contributed to an increased standard of living, while also revolutionizing what workers do and how they do it. Covering a range of topics from lifetime work patterns and education to unemployment and the welfare state, this book provides a practical introduction to the evolution of work and pay in 20th century Britain.

From assembly line to call centre, this volume charts the immense transformation of work and pay across the 20th century and provides the first labor-focused history of Britain. Written by leading British historians and economists, each chapter stands as a self-contained reading for those who need an overview of the topic, as well as an introduction to and analysis of the controversies among scholars for readers entering or refreshing deeper study.
The 20th century was a period of unrivalled change in the British labor market. Technology, social movements, and political action all contributed to an increased standard of living, while also revolutionizing what workers do and how they do it. Covering a range of topics from lifetime work patterns and education to unemployment and the welfare state, this book provides a practical introduction to the evolution of work and pay in 20th century Britain.

Kath Williams, who emerges as a feisty and quietly determined woman, was the major force behind the struggle for equal pay for women. She was elected as a delegate to attend conferences overseas and maintained her persistence for the cause with sheer hard -- almost unpaid -- work. With the increasing ignorance about history of any kind, history of this type is invaluable as it reaches back and pulls the protagonists forward into our time and helps us to understand that there is a long tradition of fighting for justice in Australia. Kath Williams will take her place as one of Australia's most important women. This book is clearly written and includes documentation and photographs from the period.

This work offers a detailed history of American actors' attempts to unionize in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Actors' unions of this period faced a staggering amount of struggles, including a heavy industry reliance on the blacklist, severe media attacks on individual actors, and the frequent formation of illegitimate company unions. This work focuses specifically on the two main unions of the time, the White Rats Actors' Union of America and the Actors' Equity Association. The author chronicles the formation of the unions along with their achievements in the following decades and outlines the roles of union leaders Harry Mountford and Francis Wilson.

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

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

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

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

Writing a book is not possible without the generous input of many people. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to thank at least some of these people. Prof. Dr. Jochen Michaelis, the supervisor of my dissertation, taught me how to do economic analysis and initiated my interest in labour market is sues. Discussions with him have always been enlightening and have greatly improved the analysis in this book. Moreover, he always encouraged me when I experienced a slump in my motivation. He never lost his calmness and good temper, not even in situations when my need for discussion must have been bothering him. Thanks for that Jochen. I'm indebted to Prof. Dr. Peter Weise for taking over the job as the sec ond referee of my thesis. He gave very valuable comments and sacrificed his christmas holiday to write the referee report as fast as possible. I also want to thank Prof. Stefan Voigt and Prof. Dr. Reinhold Kosfeld, the other two members of the dissertation committee, for the discussion during the defence of the thesis."

A groundbreaking labour study, this book offers a detailed portrait of the Citizens Alliance (CA), a union of Minneapolis business owners, which employed any means necessary to squelch the power of organised labour. The association blacklisted union workers, ran a spy network to ferret out union activity, and, when necessary, raised a private army to crush its opposition with brute force. The influence of the CA also reached across the state to battle socialists, labour unions, the Non-partisan League, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The book examines the philosophies and tactics of the Citizens Alliance from its inception in 1903 to the passage of the Labour Management Relations Act of 1947, legislation that effectively inhibited the power of unions. Based on over ten years of meticulous archival research, this book delves into such subjects as the founding of the William Hood Dunwoody Industrial Institute; the 1917 Streetcar Strike and the 1934 Teamsters' Strike; and the CA's collaboration with the Commission of Public Safety, Northwest Bancorporation, the courts, and the military. Both a business history and a labor history, "A Union Against Unions" offers a comprehensive picture of the CA's campaign against organised labour and a fascinating view of Minnesota history during the first half of the twentieth century.

In this book, Roy Church and Quentin Outram investigate the history of strike activity in the British coal mining industry, a byword for industrial militancy since the late nineteenth century. Strikes and Solidarity takes a multidisciplinary approach that blends quantitative and qualitative research methods to form a new explanation for the pattern of strike activity in the industry. It will be of interest to economic and social historians, sociologists and industrial relations specialists.

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

This is a softcover reprint of the English translation of 1968 of N. Bourbaki's, Th orie des Ensembles (1970).

This book lifts the veneer of 'employability', to expose serious problems in the way that future workers are trying to manage their employability in the competition for tough-entry jobs in the knowledge economy; in how companies understand their human resource strategies and endeavor to recruit the managers and leaders of the future; and in the government failure to come to terms with the realities of the knowledge-based economy. The demand for high-skilled, high waged jobs, has been exaggerated. But it is something that governments want to believe because it distracts attention from thorny political issues around equality, opportunity, and redistribution. If it is assumed that there are plenty of good jobs for people with the appropriate credentials then the issue of who gets the best jobs loses its political sting. But if good jobs are in limited supply, how the competition for a livelihood is organized assumes paramount importance. This issue, is not lost on the middle classes, given that they depend on academic achievement to maintain, if not advance the occupational and social status of family members. The reality is that increasing congestion in the market for knowledge workers has led to growing middle class anxieties about how their off-spring are going to meet the rising threshold of employability that now has to be achieved to stand any realistic chance of finding interesting and rewarding employment. The result is a bare-knuckle struggle for access to elite schools, colleges, universities and jobs. This book examines whether employability policies are flawed because they ignore the realities of 'positional' conflict in the competition for a livelihood, especially as the rise of mass higher education has arguably done little to increase the employability of students for tough-entry jobs. It will be of interest to anyone looking to understand the way knowledge-based firms recruit and how this is influenced by government policy, be they Researchers, Academics and Students of Business and Management, Industrial Relations, Human Resource Management, Politics or Sociology; Human Resource Management or Recruitment Professionals; or job candidates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book discusses the transformation of labour movements and trade unionism in post-liberalised India. It looks at emerging collectivism, both in formal and informal sectors, and relates it to changing political and industrial relations. Bringing together studies of resistance, struggles and new forms of negotiations from different industries -agriculture, fisheries, brick kiln, plantations, IT, domestic workers, shipbreakers, sex workers, and miners -this book exposes the myths, realities and challenges that the present generation of workers in India face and struggle with. With contributions from leading thinkers in the field, the work deepens the understanding of the current Indian labour spaces, possibilities for contestations and articulations from below. The volume will be useful to students and researchers of labour studies, economics, sociology, development studies and public policy. It will be an invaluable resource to those engaged with industrial relations, trade unions, human rights, social exclusion as well as labour organisations and research institutions.

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

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

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

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

In their efforts to achieve freedom, ex-slaves mounted a dual struggle to elude the personal domination of the old order and to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of emerging wage employment. This book draws on a rich documentary record to allow ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations that underlay their efforts. The author discusses the labor disputes that convulsed the post-Civil War South, in which can be read former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom.