An account of the assault on the Union at Grangemouth in 2013, when workers were forced to accept cuts in their pay andconditions by the owner's threat of closure. Written by the Grangemouth convenor, The Battle of Grangemouth is a vital storyin trying times, and demonstrates why, now more than ever, being organised is vital for the defense of basic right at work. Published in association with Unite the Union.This book tells the story of the industrial dispute at Grangemouth in 2013, when the owner threatened to close a large part of the complex unless the workforce accepted severe cuts to their wages and conditions. The events at Grangemouth represented, in very acute form, the disaster of contemporary approaches to running the economy. What was once a publicly owned and well-run national asset has been allowed to fall into the hands of a company controlled by one man - Jim Ratcliffe - who thus has been able to exert immense power over the future of a vital national resource.Ratcliffe conducted a relentless campaign against the union at the site, with the intention of removing its main organisers, partly through exploiting the row in Falkirk Labour Party over candidate selection. Through these endeavours he succeeded in inflicting considerable hardship on a large number of people, but he did not destroy the strong union organisation at Grangemouth, which remains committed to defending the workforce and local community from his depredations.

Who were the women who fought back at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet? Striking Women gives a voice to the women involved as they discuss their lives, their work and their trade unions. Striking Women is centred on two industrial disputes, the famous Grunwick strike (1976-78) and the Gate Gourmet dispute that erupted in 2005. Focusing on these two events, the book explores the nature of South Asian women's contribution to the struggles for workers' rights in the UK labour market. The authors examine histories of migration and settlement of two different groups of women of South Asian origin, and how this history, their gendered, classed and racialised inclusion in the labour market, the context of industrial relations in the UK in the two periods and the nature of the trade union movement shaped the trajectories and the outcomes of the two disputes. This is the first account based on the voices of the women involved. Drawing on life/work history interviews with thirty-two women who participated in the two disputes, as well as interviews with trade union officials, archival material and employment tribunal proceedings, the authors explore the motivations, experiences and implications of these events for their political and social identities.

Grunwick was the strike that changed the rules of the game.It changed the way the unions thought about race, about their own core values, and about the best way to organise among the new immigrant communities coming to Britain in the 1970s. Moreover, it changed the way unions thought about the law, and raised big questions about their will to win.In the beginning, Grunwick wasn't a strike about wages - it was about something much more important than that. It was about dignity at work. And, for the small band of Asian women strikers, who braved sun, rain and snow month-in and month-out on the picket-lines, from August 1976 to July 1978, rights in the workplace and pride at work, were far more important than any amount of money.At the time, this book was the seminal account of the dispute, providing the workers' own story in their own words and told by two of the leading participants in the strike. Now, forty years later, its themes still resonate, making this book vital reading for all of those who seek to organise within their own communities and workplaces.

In the summer of 1980, the eyes of the world turned to the Gdansk shipyard in Poland which suddenly became the nexus of a strike wave that paralyzed the entire country. The Gdansk strike was orchestrated by the members of an underground free trade union that came to be known as Solidarnosc [Solidarity]. Despite fears of a violent response from the communist authorities, the strikes spread to more than 800 sites around the country and involved over a million workers, mobilizing its working population. Faced with crippling strikes and with the eyes of the world on them, the communist regime signed landmark accords formally recognizing Solidarity as the first free trade union in a communist country. The union registered nearly ten million members, making it the world's largest union to date. In a widespread and inspiring demonstration of nonviolent protest, Solidarity managed to bring about real and powerful changes that contributed to the end of the Cold War. Solidarity:The Great Workers Strike of 1980 tells the story of this pivotal period in Poland's history from the perspective of those who lived it. Through unique personal interviews with the individuals who helped breathe life into the Solidarity movement, Michael Szporer brings home the momentous impact these events had on the people involved and subsequent history that changed the face of Europe. This movement, which began as a strike, had major consequences that no one could have foreseen at the start. In this book, the individuals who shaped history speak with their own voices about the strike that changed the course of history.

During the winter months of 2002-03 there was played out the most significant and bitter industrial dispute in the UK since the miners' strike of 1984-85. There then followed a further eighteen months of protracted negotiations, overshadowed by the Government's preparations for invasion of Iraq, constant threats to ban strikes, and the passing of draconian anti-union laws. This book tells the story of the firefighters' dispute and shines a beacon on the way the New Labour Government was prepared to go extraordinary lengths - though it was not always successful - to thwart the ambitions of a relatively small and dedicated group of public servants, who were seeking pay justice after years of decline in their relative pay, despite significant increases in productivity and skill levels.

The southern textile strikes of 1929-1931 were ferocious struggles--thousands of millhands went on strike, the National Guard was deployed, several people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. The southern press, and for a time the national press, covered the story in enormous detail. In recounting developments, southern reporters and editors found themselves swept up on a painful and sweeping re-examination and reconstruction of southern institutions and values. Whalen explores the largely unknown world of southern journalism and investigates the ways in which the upheaval in textiles triggered profound soul-searching among southerners. The southern textile strikes of 1929-1931 were ferocious struggles--thousands of millhands went on strike, the National Guard was deployed, several people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. The southern press, and for a time the national press, covered the story in enormous detail. In recounting developments, southern reporters and editors found themselves swept up on a painful and sweeping re-examination and reconstruction of southern institutions and values. Whalen explores the largely unknown world of southern journalism and investigates the ways in which the upheaval in textiles triggered profound soul-searching among southerners.

The worlds of labor, journalism, and the American South collide in this study. That collision, Whalen claims, is the prelude to the stunning social, economic, and cultural transformation of the American South which occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. The textile strikes shocked the mind of the South, a fact that can readily be seen in hometown papers, as reporters and editors ran the gamut from denial and scheming to hoping and dreaming--sometimes even bravely confronting the truth. The reevaluation of southern manners and mores that would culminate in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s can be dated back to this period of turmoil.

Who were the women who fought back at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet? Striking Women gives a voice to the women involved as they discuss their lives, their work and their trade unions. Striking Women is centred on two industrial disputes, the famous Grunwick strike (1976-78) and the Gate Gourmet dispute that erupted in 2005. Focusing on these two events, the book explores the nature of South Asian women's contribution to the struggles for workers' rights in the UK labour market. The authors examine histories of migration and settlement of two different groups of women of South Asian origin, and how this history, their gendered, classed and racialised inclusion in the labour market, the context of industrial relations in the UK in the two periods and the nature of the trade union movement shaped the trajectories and the outcomes of the two disputes. This is the first account based on the voices of the women involved. Drawing on life/work history interviews with thirty-two women who participated in the two disputes, as well as interviews with trade union officials, archival material and employment tribunal proceedings, the authors explore the motivations, experiences and implications of these events for their political and social identities.

Strike-action has long been a notable phenomenon in Israeli society, despite forces that have weakened its recurrence, such as the Arab-Jewish conflict, the decline of organized labor, and the increasing precariousness of employment. While the impact of strikes was not always immense, they are deeply rooted in Israel's past during the Ottoman Empire and Mandate Palestine. Workers persist in using them for material improvement and to gain power in both the private and public sectors, reproducing a vibrant social practice whose codes have withstood the test of time. This book unravels the trajectory of the strikes as a rich source for the social-historical analysis of an otherwise nation-oriented and highly politicized history.

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.

A lark for the sake of their country tells the tale of the upper and middle-class 'volunteers' in the 1926 General Strike in Great Britain. With behaviour derived from their play traditions - the larks, rags, fancy dress parties, and treasure hunts that prevailed at universities and country houses - the volunteers transformed a potential workers' revolution into festive public display of Englishness. Decades later, collective folk memories about this event continue to define national identity. Based on correspondence and interviews with volunteers and strikers, as well as contemporary newspapers and magazines, novels, diaries, plays, and memoirs, this book recreates the context for the volunteers' actions. It explores how the upper classes used the strike to assert their ideological right to define Britishness as well as how scholars, novelists, playwrights, diarists, museum curators, local historians, and even a theme restaurant, have continued to recycle the strike to define British identity. -- .

This book, available at last in paperback, analyses the 1984-85 miners' strike by focusing on its vital Scottish dimensions, especially the role of workplace politics and community mobilisation. The year-long strike began in Scotland, with workers defending the moral economy of the coalfields, and resisting pit closures and management attacks on trade unionism. The book relates the strike to an analysis of changing coalfield community and industrial structures from the 1960s to the 1980s. It challenges the stereotyped view that the strike began in March 1984 as a confrontation between Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader, and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. Before this point, in fact, fifty percent of Scottish miners were already on strike or engaged in a significant pit-level dispute with their managers, who were far more confrontational than their counterparts in England and Wales. The book explores the key features of the strike that followed in Scotland: the unusual industrial politics; the strong initial pattern of general solidarity; and then the emergence of varieties of pit-level commitment. -- .

The Assault on Labor details the 1986 Independent Federation of Flight Attendants (IFFA) strike against Trans World Airlines (TWA), one of the most dramatic instances of the heightened labor conflict in the 1980s. Using extensive court, union, and company documents, The Assault on Labor shows how the expanded use of permanent replacements in labor disputes has fundamentally altered workers' legal right to strike. Set within one of the biggest corporate raids of the time, it was a strike of a predominantly female labor force that garnered respect throughout the labor movement for its solidarity and determination. Faced with the permanent replacement of over 5000 strikers, IFFA waged a three year struggle to return all workers to the line, mobilizing political, economic, and legal actions to secure their jobs and survive as a union. Despite critical successes in the courts in the aftermath of the strike, the Supreme Court would render a decision that further strengthened permanent replacements. Since the 1980s, labor's major form of protest, the right to strike, has all but disappeared.

In the summer of 1980, the eyes of the world turned to the Gdansk shipyard in Poland which suddenly became the nexus of a strike wave that paralyzed the entire country. The Gdansk strike was orchestrated by the members of an underground free trade union that came to be known as Solidarnosc [Solidarity]. Despite fears of a violent response from the communist authorities, the strikes spread to more than 800 sites around the country and involved over a million workers, mobilizing its working population. Faced with crippling strikes and with the eyes of the world on them, the communist regime signed landmark accords formally recognizing Solidarity as the first free trade union in a communist country. The union registered nearly ten million members, making it the world's largest union to date. In a widespread and inspiring demonstration of nonviolent protest, Solidarity managed to bring about real and powerful changes that contributed to the end of the Cold War. Solidarity:The Great Workers Strike of 1980 tells the story of this pivotal period in Poland's history from the perspective of those who lived it. Through unique personal interviews with the individuals who helped breathe life into the Solidarity movement, Michael Szporer brings home the momentous impact these events had on the people involved and subsequent history that changed the face of Europe. This movement, which began as a strike, had major consequences that no one could have foreseen at the start. In this book, the individuals who shaped history speak with their own voices about the strike that changed the course of history.

First published in 1998, this book, through a combination of theoretical and empirical research, tries to advance beyond the available literature to an understanding of the links between strike activity and the political process. Although its primary focus is upon the long-term impact of the 1984/85 Miners' Strike, it discusses other industrial settings and 'political' disputes. By linking the political socialisation process with strike activity in a refreshing and thought-provoking manner, this book provides an insight into why some people are more interested and involved in political activity in comparison with the population at large.

First published in 1986, this book challenges the notion that the miners' strike of 1984-5 was 'Scargill's Strike'. It shows some of the ways in which the strike, though nominally directed from above, was determined from below by multitudinous and often contradictory pressures - the lodge, the village and the home. The focus is essentially logical and gives particular attention to family economy, kin networks and intergenerational solidarity. At the same time it is concerned with the mentality of the strike - its ruling fears and passions. The first-hand testimonies that comprise the book attest to the attachment to 'traditional ways' as well as the potency of the influences corroding them.

This is the story of power and the abuse of power that led to the demise of a major federal union and the firing of over 11,000 federal employees. The Professional Air Traffic Controller's Organization (PATCO) misjudged the political sentiment of the nation, the willingness of the Reagan Administration to implement its social and economic agenda, and the ability of the union to achieve its goals through work stoppages.

The events of 1981, chronicled in this story, severely undermined the union movement and set the stage for labor-management relations in the public sector for the subsequent two decades. Equally important, issues that lead to the PATCO strike were not addressed by the FAA or the Department of Transportation, and many of the same problems still plague the federal system today. While the PATCO debacle and its aftermath are now reasonably clear, what is unclear is whether the union and government leaders learned from the event.

If you want to avoid the traditional destructive bargaining methods employed in the majority of America's schools, this book is for you. An exploration of the 'win-win' model and the compromises that must be employed before the model is to succeed, Streshly's book is eminently practical. Drawn from decades of personal experience as an administrator and superintendent, the book begins with the 'bread and butter' of teacher's union issues--salaries and benefits. It continues to explain how to prevent strikes, how to get the school board behind the administration, how to utilize outside negotiators, and contains numerous checklists and tactical outlines.

Spoiled Silk is the story of two immigrants from the Rhineland, William Brueckmann and his wife Katherine, who started a new life in America's first industrial city, Paterson NJ, nourishing a vision of their adopted country that was never to be. Committed to a socialist dream, they struggled to improve the lot of their follow immigrants and, at the same time, to raise a family in the midst of the turbulence that surrounded them. Their efforts contributed in the long run to improved working conditions in American mills, but their dream of a socialist America was never to be realized. It was in 1913 that the workers in the Paterson textile mills, having learned that a new kind of loom would put many of them out of work went on strike against the mill owners. In desperation, they called in Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies of the I.W.W. to help them. The Paterson authorities moved quickly to crush the strike by forbidding the strikers to hold public meetings. Alone among elected local officials, William Brueckmann, Mayor of the neighboring town of Haledon, defied the Paterson authorities and their police department and upheld the constitutional rights of the strikers by giving them a safe haven in his town. His action marked the beginning of a long and bitter struggle that brought thousands of workers to the open fields of Haledon and forced the city of Paterson to its knees.The strike is an important chapter in the history of the American labor movement. For William and Katherine Brueckmann it did not however, mark the end of their struggles. Spoiled Silk also chronicles the prejudice they had to face during the First World War and the pressures that eventually drove them to compromise with post-war America and its Good Times. It was a compromise that would bring with it a different kind of tragedy and sorrow, the death of an only son and their own drawing apart from one another. The recent interest in immigrants to America has almost overlooked the largest group of immigrants, the German Americans. Spoiled Silk is a moving story about two of them. Vividly told, Spoiled Silk brings to life the experiences of these valiant people in the early decades of the century just past.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines international and European protection of the right to strike. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which the International Labour Organisation, the Council of Europe and the European Union have set standards designed to protect those who organise or participate in industrial action.

In a time of controversy over the relevance and utility of industrial action, this book outlines the case for protection of a right to strike. It argues that such a right can be viewed as civil, political and socio-economic in nature, depending upon one's conception of 'good governance' and 'democratic participation' at the national level. This has consequences for what is perceived to be the appropriate scope of the right and the extent of any legitimate exceptions.

This thoroughly revised and updated second edition of When Health Care Employees Strike is an essential survival guide for health care administrators who must plan for and cope with the inevitable labor dispute. Written by Kenneth Kruger and Norman Metzger— two experts in the field of health care labor relations— this much-needed resource includes the critical information and useful strategies health care executives must have in order to be properly prepared. The authors provide detailed information on labor law, an analysis of the different types of disputes, advice on how to use mediation effectively, suggestions for assessing manpower needs before a strike occurs, and ideas for preparing contingency plans. In addition to presenting information on ways to prevent strikes, the book also contains a comprehensive step-by-step manual to ensure health care organizations can continue operation during a labor dispute.

First published in 1998, this book, through a combination of theoretical and empirical research, tries to advance beyond the available literature to an understanding of the links between strike activity and the political process. Although its primary focus is upon the long-term impact of the 1984/85 Miners' Strike, it discusses other industrial settings and 'political' disputes. By linking the political socialisation process with strike activity in a refreshing and thought-provoking manner, this book provides an insight into why some people are more interested and involved in political activity in comparison with the population at large.