Solidarity Road tells the story of Jan Theron’s involvement in the Food and Canning Workers Union (FCWU) during apartheid South Africa. Part memoir, part history this fascinating tale will reveal what working conditions were like in the 1970’s. It outlines the very beginnings of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Theron states, ‘Solidarity in a trade union does not simply mean standing by your members, or by organised workers. It means solidarity with your class. At the time, in 1976, the working class was fragmented. Working for a trade union was part of a project to unite a fragmented class, and to give it a voice. This was the historical project to which a number of people from a certain intellectual background were drawn. This would be our contribution to the struggle: what we did to end apartheid. It was a struggle for democracy, but democracy did not just mean everyone getting to vote every so often in national elections. People also had to eat.

The most obvious way in which the working class was then fragmented was in terms of race. The Union put its commitment to solidarity into practice by uniting workers of different races in factories manufacturing food. To do so it had to overcome divisions among workers created by the ways in which government had structured employment, in terms of the law, which the bosses were able to exploit. Nowadays ‘bosses’ seems like a dated term, yet this is the term workers used to refer to the people for whom they actually worked. It is also no less important today than it was then to differentiate between those who control the factories and mines and those who operate at their behest.

In the last twenty years, Italy has undergone significant changes in the functioning of the labor market and industrial relations. This makes it an excellent case study for evaluating labor market practices and possibilities for reform. This book brings together leading Italian and European scholars to trace the evolution of labor bargaining and industrial relations from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.

How can we account for the dynamic growth of East and Southeast Asian countries? Much of the debate has turned on the question of the 'state' versus the 'market' as exclusive (and often competing) explanations of the successful performance of individual countries. This book explores the distinctively interdependent nature of the East and Southeast Asian experience. As firms create a regional organization of production, the growing interdependence of national labour markets is one major outcome.

London's Global Office Economy: From Clerical Factory to Digital Hub is a timely and comprehensive study of the office from the very beginnings of the workplace to its post-pandemic future. The book takes the reader on a journey through five ages of the office, encompassing sixteenth-century coffee houses and markets, eighteenth-century clerical factories, the corporate offices emerging in the nineteenth, to the digital and network offices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While offices might appear ubiquitous, their evolution and role in the modern economy are among the least explained aspects of city development. One-third of the workforce uses an office; and yet the buildings themselves - their history, design, construction, management and occupation - have received only piecemeal explanation, mainly in specialist texts. This book examines everything from paper clips and typewriters, to design and construction, to workstyles and urban planning to explain the evolution of the 'office economy'. Using London as a backdrop, Rob Harris provides built environment practitioners, academics, students and the general reader with a fascinating, illuminating and comprehensive perspective on the office. Readers will find rich material linking fields that are normally treated in isolation, in a story that weaves together the pressures exerting change on the businesses that occupy office space with the motives and activities of those who plan, supply and manage it. Our unfolding understanding of offices, the changes through which they have passed, the nature of office work itself and its continuing evolution is a fascinating story and should appeal to anyone with an interest in contemporary society and its relationship with work.

A renowned economic historian traces women's journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed-and the barriers they faced-in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women's advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic's silver lining. Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Since 1958, the economic theory of the participatory or labor-managed firm and its performance compared to capitalist firms, has exploded into a vast literature comprising several hundred articles. Indeed, as one early contributor has recently remarked, the theory has become a 'new discipline' in itself. Producer Cooperatives and Labor-Managed Systems provides, for the first time, a careful selection of the most significant theoretical and empirical contributions to this burgeoning field, and promises to become a valuable research tool and reference volume.

The transformation of China's economy from a centrally planned to a market-oriented system has had a profound impact on management systems and practices at the firm level, particularly changes to the organization of work. One of the consequences of this is increasing social disparity reflected through inequality of employees' income and employment conditions. This book, based on extensive original research including interviews and questionnaire surveys in different regions of China, explores the exact nature of these changes and their effects. It examines state-owned enterprises, foreign-owned enterprises and domestic private enterprises, discusses the extent to which employees are satisfied with their employment conditions and whether they think their employment conditions are fair and outlines how managers and employees in China expect conditions to change in future.

The integrity of tax systems as we know them are being challenged throughout the world. Tax avoidance schemes of various kinds are proving increasingly attractive and lucrative to wealthy individuals and large corporations. As governments fear the erosion of their tax base among those who are most able to contribute, the public is looking on, as one of its most public institutions attempts to re-invent itself through changing laws and administrative procedures. In this book, a number of experts develop the idea of responsive regulation in relation to taxation. They demonstrate how law in this area is undermining social norms and social norms are undermining law. A key factor in their analysis is the perception of justice. Explanations as to why the integrity of tax systems is under siege, and possible solutions, are examined.

This book examines the long-term impact of redundancy on a workforce who lost their jobs when a Sheffield steel company closed one of its plants. The authors set the key findings of a large number of detailed interviews in the context of the discussion of economic decline, deindustrialization, redundancy, unemployment and employment policy. They also analyse current debates about the impact of recession, the role of trade unions and possible solutions to structural unemployment. "After Redundancy" provides valuable insights into the impact of recession on a workforce accustomed to relative affluence. It also records interesting shifts in attitudes towards trade unions and the Labour Party. The book is intended for second or third year undergraduates and researchers in sociology of work, sociology of Britain, industrial sociology, industrial relations, labour studies and employment policy studies.

Global Talent seeks to examine the utility of skilled foreigners beyond their human capital value by focusing on their social capital potential, especially their role as transnational bridges between host and home countries. Gi-Wook Shin and Joon Nak Choi build on an emerging stream of research that conceptualizes global labor mobility as a positive-sum game in which countries and businesses benefit from building ties across geographic space, rather than the zero-sum game implied by the "global war for talent" and "brain drain" metaphors. The book empirically demonstrates its thesis by examination of the case of Korea: a state archetypical of those that have been embracing economic globalization while facing a demographic crisis-and one where the dominant narrative on the recruitment of skilled foreigners is largely negative. It reveals the unique benefits that foreign students and professionals can provide to Korea, by enhancing Korean firms' competitiveness in the global marketplace and by generating new jobs for Korean citizens rather than taking them away. As this research and its key findings are relevant to other advanced societies that seek to utilize skilled foreigners for economic development, the arguments made in this book offer insights that extend well beyond the Korean experience.

This book brings together insights and reflections following a set of interviews conducted with the main stakeholders involved in past, current, and future basic income experiments. It provides an analysis of some of the major elements and factors influencing experiments, as well of some of their most important outputs understood as results of their own experimental design, their sociological and political basis, and the epistemological status of their results. By pursuing a bottom-up strategy, where the interviews conducted take a pivotal role in the collection and analysis phase of the book, this book gathers key questions relating to policy experiments. Some questions reflected upon include the general idea of why one should engage and implement a basic income experiment, and the paradox consisting in the fact that most basic income experiments fall short of being closely considered "pure" basic income schemes. In facing the question and the paradox head-on, the book assesses questions of experimental design, the political and social context surrounding the policy, and the main results and what can they tell us about basic income.

Artificial intelligence and the autonomous robots of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will render certain jobs and competences obsolete but will also create new roles, which in turn require new sets of skills. They will also transform how we produce, distribute and consume, as well as how we think. Rather than a linear understanding of evolutionary processes, we will develop a more interactive and circular interpretation. This book offers a unique and holistic perspective on the future of work in the context of industry 4.0. It discusses the globalization of capital markets, how artificial intelligence can help organizations to be more competitive and the new role of leadership in this technological landscape. The author argues that there are four categories of competences, which will be required in order to maintain the relevance of human skills and expertise in the innovation economy. The new jobs that come into being will lend themselves to a particular set of skills. General competences will be necessary for roles involving the 4Cs of communication, creativity, collaboration and change. Specific or STEM competences will be called for across the science, technology, engineering and mathematics sectors. Human competences will lend themselves to positions comprising the SELC framework of social, emotional, leadership and cultural skills. Critical or REVE competences will be in demand for roles embracing reflection, ethics, values and the environment. The book provides a human-centric view of the current technological advancements of artificial intelligence and robotics and offers a positive outlook for human actors seeking continued relevance. It will appeal to scholars and students of the innovation economy, the knowledge society and the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

First published in 1987. This volume explores the inter-war unemployment problem and the development of economic and social policy in relation to that problem. Contemporary policies and levels of unemployment can only be compared with the inter-war period and in recent years economists and other commentators have increasingly turned their attention to the 1930s. This book is written by a group of expert historians and policy analysts who have been in the forefront of recent research. In particular, new insights into economic policy which have come from the release of cabinet and departmental papers at The Public Record Office are revealed. Recent economic theory is also taken into account and the findings question established views on many grounds. New economic lessons from the 1930s are suggested and some astonishing similarities to the 1980s and demonstrated. This work will be essential reading for students of modern British history and economic and social history as well as economic policy and government and politics.

First published in 1995. Over the last several decades there has been much concern that international trade has been destroying "good" jobs in the United States. This book provides a thorough empirical examination of this issue, focussing on the years when large, continuous deficits began. The analysis examines occupational employment data for 118 occupations in 156 different industries, and will be of interest to both students of business and economics and policy makers.

First published in 1987. The reform of the welfare state in the United Kingdom is high on the agenda of all political parties and the proposals for reform, both official and private, are numerous. In this book, Professor Beenstock and his colleagues took a comprehensive account of the social security of the 1980s, as well as the tax system, as it had evolved over the Beveridge era and how it affected our incentive to work. The book describes the theory of labour supply decisions in their relationship to the tax benefit system. It illustrates how tax and social security arrangements affected labour supply decisions as well as monitoring how these decisions had evolved over the post-war period. It also considers retirement decisions in the UK as well as the government's plans to reform the social security system.

First published in 1984. This book presents a great deal of research findings, new advances in theory and comprehensive overviews of key aspects of labour economics. It examines the latest trends in the field and assesses the impact of recent policies together with the likely impact of proposed policies. This study covers a wide range of topics but concentrates in particular on questions connected with the economics of trade unions which is a major area of concern for labour economists.

First published in 1997. Politicians of all shades argue that the labour market should be more flexible and workers more mobile. But what does this mean in reality? How flexible and mobile are workers likely to be? Is there an ideological base to the language of flexibility? These are some of the issues covered in this book. Data from a large factory and office is used to argue that the macro labour market consists of non-competitive work groups where strongly held views and values represent a substantial barrier to simplistic definitions of flexibility and mobility. The analysis takes place in three chapters, dealing with recruitment for work, skills used in work and perceptions of different types of work and workers. The findings suggest that non-economic forces (such as institutional, social, historical and political phenomena) strongly influence the creation of separate work cultures. Furthermore, it is argued that the reason for differences between work groups being articulated in a defensive fashion reflects the climate of fear in the labour market, where flexibility is associated with a loss of the (often limited) power, control and influence workers have over their position in the labour market.

First published in 1985. Increasing doubt is being shed on the proposition that higher levels of education in developing countries are an unmitigated good. Unemployment among school leavers and university graduates is now a major problem. Some people argue that what is needed is a reform of primary education and the changing of attitudes to work; but many of the measures adopted have failed to achieve these goals and have only worsened the problem by increasing costs, making curricula less flexible and by increasing 'mis-education'. This book examines the problems and the measures adopted to alleviate them in four important developing countries. It provides many new research findings and much new thinking and concludes with suggestions for improving policies.

First published in 1981. This book reports on a decade of research into the effects of taxation on the supply of labour. In addition to their work in making labour supply estimates, the study explores a number of the ways labour supply estimates can be used. When budget constraints are non-linear it is not possible to estimate the effects of (tax) or other policy changes from knowledge of labour supply elasticities alone, and it is necessary to re-estimate the original model used to derive the estimates. The implications of labour supply estimates for the study of inequality and optimal taxation are considered. Macro-economic models of the economy typically omit labour supply functions or include functions which are inconsistent with micro-economic work on labour supply. This book will appeal to academic economists, senior students and policy-makers in the field of public finance and labour economics, who will find much of interest from both the theoretical and policy standpoints.

First published in 1920. This study examines the science of industrial work and the advances in its application to the economic life of the community. The author commences this volume with a brief explanation of the general principles of Theoretical Mechanics which have been applied in the study of the Human Motor. Space has also been devoted to the explanation of the laws of thermo-dynamics and of the Conservation of Energy. These provide the reader with the means by which muscular work and fatigue can be measured. This title will be of interest to students of economics and business.

Over the past few decades, the world economy has undergone radical transformations, in part connected to the expansion of the 'digital economy', in part to the growing interconnection via the internet of the world of objects and physical processes. This 'great transformation' poses the dilemma on the capitalism's ability to reconcile economic and social value, keeping together economic well-being, social cohesion and political freedom. The Economy of Collaboration can offer a contribution in this direction but requires courageous policies to mediate the various interests at stake, as well as to rethink and make more sustainable its development, by increasing the benefits not only for businesses but also for workers and consumers. In short, to create shared value. This book refers to a mode of organizing the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services based on cooperative relations. The main reference is to activities linked to the digital economy, since they are the emerging forms of a definitely older phenomenon, but which is expanding on an ever-wider scale thanks to new technologies. These collaborative activities can be regulated differently, along a continuum that ranges from the pole of market exchanges to that of generalized reciprocity, with various intermediate mixed forms.

India Migration Report 2020 examines how migration surveys operate to collect, analyse and bring to life socio-economic issues in social science research. With a focus on the strategies and the importance of information collected by Kerala Migration Surveys since 1998, the volume: Explores the effect of male migration on women left behind; attitudes of male migrants within households; the role of transnational migration and it effect on attitudes towards women; Investigates consumption of remittances and their utilization; asset accumulation and changing economic statuses of households; financial inclusion of migrants and migration strategies during times of crises like the Kerala floods of 2018; Highlights the twenty-year experience of the Kerala Migration Surveys, how its model has been adapted in various states and led to the proposed large-scale India Migration Survey; and Explores issues of migration politics and governance, as well as return migration strategies of other countries to provide a roadmap for India. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of development studies, economics, demography, sociology and social anthropology, and migration and diaspora studies.

Avoiding prejudice will be critical to economic success in the fourth industrial revolution. It is not the new and innovative technology that will matter in the next decade, but what we do with it. Using technology properly, with diverse decision making, is the difference between success and failure in a changing world. This will require putting the right person in the right job at the right time. Prejudice stops that happening. Profit and Prejudice takes us through the relationship between economic success and prejudice in labour markets. It starts with the major changes that occur in periods of economic upheaval. These changes tend to be unpopular and complex - and complexity encourages people to turn to the simplistic arguments of 'scapegoat economics' and prejudice. Some of the changes of the fourth industrial revolution will help fight prejudice, but some will make it far worse. The more prejudice there is, the harder it will be for companies and countries to profit from the changes ahead. Profit is not the main argument against prejudice, but can certainly help fight it. This book tells a story of the damage that prejudice can do. Using economics without jargon, students, investors and the public will be able to follow the narrative and see how prejudice can be opposed. Prejudice is bad for business and the economy. Profit and Prejudice explains why.

As the dust settles on nearly three decades of economic reform in Latin America, one of the most fundamental economic policy areas has changed far less than expected: labor regulation. To date, Latin America's labor laws remain both rigidly protective and remarkably diverse. "Continuity Despite Change" develops a new theoretical framework for understanding labor laws and their change through time, beginning by conceptualizing labor laws as comprehensive systems or "regimes." In this context, Matthew Carnes demonstrates that the reform measures introduced in the 1980s and 1990s have only marginally modified the labor laws from decades earlier. To explain this continuity, he argues that labor law development is constrained by long-term economic conditions and labor market institutions. He points specifically to two key factors--the distribution of worker skill levels and the organizational capacity of workers.
Carnes presents cross-national statistical evidence from the eighteen major Latin American economies to show that the theory holds for the decades from the 1980s to the 2000s, a period in which many countries grappled with proposed changes to their labor laws. He then offers theoretically grounded narratives to explain the different labor law configurations and reform paths of Chile, Peru, and Argentina. His findings push for a rethinking of the impact of globalization on labor regulation, as economic and political institutions governing labor have proven to be more resilient than earlier studies have suggested.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This text offers a comprehensive and nuanced view of the economic development of Spain since 1850. It provides a new set of historical GDP estimates for Spain from the demand and supply sides, and presents a reconstruction of production and expenditure series for the century prior to the introduction of modern national accounts. The author splices available national accounts sets over the period 1958-2015 through interpolation, as an alternative to conventional retropolation. The resulting national accounts series are linked to the historical estimates providing yearly series for GDP and its components since 1850. On the basis of new population estimates, the author derives GDP per head, decomposed into labour productivity and the amount of work per person, and placed into international perspective. With theoretical reasoning and historiographical implications, Prados de la Escosura provides a useful methodological reference work for anyone interested in national accounting. Open Access has been made possible thanks to Fundacion Rafael del Pino's generous support. You can find the full dataset here: http://espacioinvestiga.org/bbdd-chne/?lang=en 'This book stands among the classics for the Kuznetian paradigm in empirical economics. This is the definitive study of Spain's transition to a modern economy.' -Patrick Karl O'Brien, Emeritus Fellow at St. Antony's College, the University of Oxford, UK, and Professor Emeritus of Global Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK 'The definitive account of Spanish economic growth since 1850, based firmly on a magisterial reconstruction of that country's national accounts and an unrivalled knowledge of both Spanish and global economic history of the period.' -Stephen Broadberry, Professor of Economic History at Nuffield College, the University of Oxford, UK