From Chinese factories making cheap toys for export, to sweatshops in Bangladesh where name-brand garments are sewn - studies on the impact of globalization on workers have tended to focus on the worst jobs and the worst conditions. But in When Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on a major industry - the North American auto industry - to reveal that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs. Rothstein argues that the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers. Focusing on three General Motors plants assembling SUVs - an older plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a newer and more viable plant in Arlington, Texas; and a ""greenfield site"" (a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility) in Silao, Mexico - When Good Jobs Go Bad shows how global competition has made nonstop, monotonous, standardized routines crucial for the survival of a plant, and it explains why workers and their local unions struggle to resist. For instance, in the United States, General Motors forced workers to accept intensified labor by threatening to close plants, which led local unions to adopt ""keep the plant open"" as their main goal. At its new factory in Silao, GM had hand-picked the union - one opposed to strikes and committed to labor-management cooperation - before it hired the first worker. Rothstein's engaging comparative analysis, which incorporates the viewpoints of workers, union officials, and management, sheds new light on labor's loss of bargaining power in recent decades, and highlights the negative impact of globalization on all jobs, both good and bad, from the sweatshop to the assembly line.

This book explores the representation of women and their interests in the world of work across four trade unions in France and the UK. Drawing on case studies of the careers of 100 activists and a longitudinal study of the trade unions' struggle for equal pay in the UK, it unveils the social, organizational, and political conditions that contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities or, on the contrary, allow the promotion of equality. Guillaume's nuanced evaluation is a call to redefine the role of trade unions in the delivering of gender equality, contributing to broader debates on the effectiveness of equality policies and the enforcement of equality legislation.

This is the first comprehensive account in any language of Israel's central labour organization (the Histradut) and the Israeli Labour Party.

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.

The postman and the primary teacher, the midwife and the musician. Workers in shops, workers at sea. Solidarity with the Columbian farmer and the Palestinian fireman…   Modern trade unionists in Scotland perform roles in every imaginable location and are drawn from all backgrounds. They campaign to win on issues facing the colleague next to them or a comrade thousands of miles away. ’Mon the Workers tells their stories in their own words. It is a celebration of 125 years of the STUC, and a clarion call for the next generation to agitate, organise and win. This book demonstrates past achievements, explores the ideas trade unionists have fought for and rouses the movement towards future victories. 75 trade union members, reps and officials share experiences of union life from the anti-apartheid movement to Wick Wants Work. Alan McCredie’s charismatic portraits of 50 other activists from the trade union movement provide a complementary visual narrative. This very human book pulses with the energy of Scotland’s trade union movement, which has achieved so much and still has more to do.

This book introduces a framework to assist human resource practitioners and organisations embrace strategies that will drive high engagement levels within organisations with a union presence. The authors address established definitions of engagement and how they have been conceptualised in academic and practitioners' literature, before exploring and unpacking circumstances that influence levels of engagement amongst employees in a unionised environment. In doing so, the framework introduced elaborates on approaches and interventions with the greatest potential to create, improve, and embed high levels of engagement within the unionised work environment.

Examining twenty-five years of theatre history, this book covers the major plays that feature representations of the Industrial Workers of the World. American class movement and class divisions have long been reflected on the Broadway stage and here Michael Schwartz presents a fresh look at the conflict between labor and capital.

Self-representation has a long, venerable history dating to biblical times and continuing through the common law, the colonial era, to the present. This book collects and analyzes the law, ethics opinions, and empirical studies about the wide range of issues surrounding Self-represented litigants (SRLs) in our justice system, including how much, if any, assistance should a judge provide, what duties do lawyers interacting with SRLs, and many others. Using recent empirical studies from both Civil litigation and criminal defense, Jona Goldschmidt argues that SRLs' cases cannot be fairly heard without a mandatory judicial duty of reasonable assistance. In order to maintain public trust and confidence in our justice system, self-represented parties must be guided and assisted. Courts and the legal profession should continue to adapt and meet the challenge of managing and interacting with those who choose or are compelled to self-represent. Only when self-represented litigants are embraced by the courts, they will finally receive "equal justice under law." This book would be of interest to those studying criminal justice and legal studies, specifically legal history and legal ethics, as well as judges, lawyers and other professionals in the field.

This book explores the politics of localism, drawing on the work of groups in three communities in post-industrial Nottinghamshire. "Third Way" politics gave a high priority to local participation, seen as a way of rebuilding social networks, and shifting welfare provision from the state onto civil society. However, under increasingly difficult conditions of austerity, significant contradictions emerge between the aims of entrenching new markets for service provision, and reviving communities and democratic participation. Exploring in depth community organisers' understandings of political economy and its local effects, and the governance practices which set the frameworks for fiercely independent community groups, the book outlines the forms of politics which emerge. This includes a challenge to the dominant thinking of the 'neoliberal consensus', but also frustration and a sense of political communal loss which has left these communities alienated from both national politics and the often-unattainable benefits of global mobility - an alienation which makes the Brexit vote of 2016 explicable as the disruptive outcome of a slow-burning political crisis of long duration.

With the world changing at breakneck speed and workers at the whim of apps, bad bosses and zero-hours contracts, why should we care about unions? Aren't they just for white-haired, middle-aged miners anyway? The government constantly attacks unions, CEOs devote endless time and resources to undermining them, and many unions themselves are stuck in the past. Despite this, inspiring work is happening all the time, from fast food strikes and climate change campaigning to the modernisation of unions for the digital age. Speaking to academics, experts and grassroots organisers from TUC, UNISON, ACORN, IWGB and more, Eve Livingston explores how young workers are organising to demand fair workplaces, and reimagines what an inclusive union movement that represents us all might look like. Working together can change the course of history, and our bosses know that. Yes, you need a union, but your union also needs you!

The Necessity of Organization describes Mary Kenney O'Sullivan's struggle to improve labor conditions through trade unionism. Appointed the first woman organizer for the American Federation of Labor in 1892, she went on to be a co-founder of the Women's Trade Union League, formed in 1903 as a cross-class alliance of women workers and their middle- and upper-class allies. The possibilities and limits of trade unionism for women, given the class and gender constraints of the period, are the focus of this book.

First published in 1993, The History of the Yorkshire Miners 1881-1918 is concerned with the workers in the Yorkshire coal industry, their union, and the broader mining communities in which they lived from the formation of the Yorkshire Miners' Association in 1881 through to the end of the First World War. The period covered is of considerable importance for the consolidation of the Yorkshire Miners Union, and indeed for the building of a national miners' federation and an international miners' organisation, in both of which the role of Yorkshire's leadership was central. The decades straddling the turn of the century were characterised by volatility in the mining industry, which was reflected in a number of strikes. Carolyn Baylies traces these general processes and focuses, in detail, upon a number of episodes during which union struggles and community involvement coalesced. She explores the dynamic between district and local levels of the union, and the tensions that accompanied a progressive rationalization of bargaining machinery. This book will be of interest to students of history and sociology.

This book analyzes how a sizable group of Gennan workers came to support Communism and how they in turn influenced the emergence and development of the German Communist Party (KPD) in its fonnative period as a mass party. It reconstructs the interaction between a party and the constituency to which it appealed within the constraints and opportunities set by social structures, econo mic conditions, and political competitors. This interaction revolved around the elaboration and implementation of a specific concept of revolutionary politics, and this study investigates both the rise of the KPD as a mass party and its failure to set off a socialist revolution in the early 1920s in light of the contradictory ways German workers responded to its revolutionary strategy. When I began to study the KPD in the mid 1970s, scholarly works in the West portrayed a party so out of touch with the realities of German life from 1918 to 1933 that its history was a litany of political mistakes that led from crisis to catastrophe. The KPD was dominated by the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, by factional disputes and personal rivalries among the leadership, by an authoritarian, centralized party structure that stifled rank-and-file initiative and imposed a party line determined in Moscow and Berlin, and by a rigid ideology largely irrelevant to trends in German economy, society, and politics with at best compensatory value for a minority of the most impoverished workers."

Gall has compiled what is almost certainly the definitive study of right-to-work campaigns at the national and state levels since the early 1940's. . . . The author's emphasis on carefully documenting these campaigns means that this book will primarily interest specialists in political science and labor history. Further, this book will be a handy reference source for other readers who want to separate rhetoric from reality on this contentious issue. Choice The Politics of Right to Work presents both a comprehensive history of organized labor's response to the challenges posed by the right to work movement and an in-depth examination of the partisan political dimensions of that challenge. The first full-length treatment of the subject to cover the period from the early 1940s through the late 1970s, the study uses qualitative and quantative analytical techniques to examine the political implications of states' attempts to restrict union security since the first right-to-work laws were passed in Novermber 1944.

Originally published in 1987, this book traces the historical and sociological dimensions of the Trade Union movement and analyses the nature of the trade unions' involvement in the UK Labour Party during the 1970s and 80s. It discusses the review campaigns, and their implications, both for trade unions specifically and for politics in general. From the viewpoint of the trade unions, this book tells of an experience which was, for the Thatcher era, uniquely successful and innervating, opening up new approaches to campaigning.

Originally published in 1973, this book was designed as a concise and usable guide to those aspects of the law which particularly affect trade union members and officials. It deals with the internal and external affairs of trade unions and the law relating to collective bargaining. It also covers deals with dismissal from employment, redundancy and employers' liability for industrial injuries. The information is presented in a readable form without technical footnotes but with a considerable amount of background information. Diagrams and charts are used where applicable to present or reinforce information.

Originally published in 1976, Democracy and Government in European Trade Unions is a detailed and practical examination of the organisational structure and internal control of trade unions in 8 Western European countries. It provides an introduction to the characteristics and styles of trade unionism in Europe. Written at a time when the international dimension of trade unionism had taken on a new significance, this comprehensive study explains and compares fundamental issues of union organisation and administration. The relationship between individual unions and the national confederations is described and the internal operation of unions in the engineering, textile and railway unions of the various countries examined. This guide to the ways and means of European trade unionism during the 1970s will be of interest to students of industrial relations and trade unionists.

Originally published in 1934, Trade Unions and the State is a study of political institutions. This is a lucid account of the diverse views that have been held about the nature, attributes, functions and prerogatives of the State. The book analyses the changing status and treatment of Trade Unions under the law of the UK during the early part of the 20th century.

Originally published in 1952, Trade Unions quickly became a classic and went through 7 editions. It is a brief yet comprehensive guide to the complex structure and administration of British Trade Unions, which deals concisely and lucidly with every important aspect of the complicated tangle of organisations.

Originally published in 1952, The Government of British Trade Unions analyses the government, in theory and in practice, of one of Britain's most important labour organizations - The Transport and General Works Union in the first half of the 20th Century. It is an appraisal of the role of the rank and file within this union of over one million members, to determine both the opportunity for, and the extent of their participation in, this State within a State. Original sources and materials, which had not previously been made public in relation to any major British or American Trade Union, were used to ascertain member turnover, participation in elections, attendance at Branch meetings and the effect of the repeal of the Trade Disputes Act on Labour Party membership. The study is of great interest both for the light it throws on the general question of Trade Unions in the modern State, and for its analysis of the Transport and General Works Union itself.

Originally published in 1977, this book explains the complexity of collective bargaining and discusses the nature of trade unionism and trade unions, emphasising the collectivity aspect. It discusses a union's work at local and national levels, when dealing with an employers' federation, and with various types of employers. Among the topics covered are the legal processes involved in collective bargaining, the topics about which collective bargaining takes place (recognition, the salary package, pensions, for example, and the back-up services necessary to conduct effective bargaining and industrial action.

Originally published in 1979 at a time when white-collar union membership had increased both in the public and private sectors of the economy, this book explains who the members were, why there was such astonishing membership growth and the circumstances which surrounded it. The history of this growth is recorded and the special problems of organization and recruitment are outlined. Issues discussed include bargaining, communications, the salary package concept, organization and recruitment problems, the rewards system, incomes policies, government liaison work and industrial democracy.

Originally published in 1962, this book analyses and assesses the Swedish Government and structure of both trade unions and employers' organizations, including the spread of unionism to white-collar workers. It then examines Swedish labour legislation, which established an act on Collective Contracts, a Labour Court and a mediation service. The book also shows the collective bargaining system at work under conditions of full employment, and examines critically the attempts to develop a policy for wages through the labour market organizations, rather than by government decree. Anyone, in mature or developing economies, concerned with collective bargaining and wage policies will find this lucid study of the Swedish system a rich source book for positive policies.

Originally published in 1935, this provocative book examined the tendencies of the Trade Unions in early 20th Century Britain in the light of their history. An advocate of a Socialist society, the author regarded the form and limited functions of the trade unions as temporary and predicted that they would be transformed into industrial unions and become part of the administrative mechanism of industry which would endure.