This book, first published in 1994, explores the impact of work and gender roles on union activism, and identifies factors that support and hinder women's representation in trade unions. These issues are discussed in terms of gender role, work-related and union-related factors. The author details what trade unionists are doing to challenge inequalities that still exist, and identifies factors that divide and unite men and women within trade unions. The author shows the impact that feminism has had on the trade union movement and explores the extent to which men and women have similar priorities for collective bargaining.

In this book, first published in 1975, the author examines the role of women in the workforce. Despite representing a rapidly increasing section of the workforce, why are women still overwhelmingly confined to unskilled jobs? Why do they hold such a tiny proportion of managerial and professional posts? In answering these vital questions Ross Davies shows how women's economic roles in pre-industrial society were modified and distorted by industrialisation; how this legacy of exploitation has affected contemporary attitudes among both men and women; and how the present situation should be seen and assessed in its proper perspective.

Historical Studies in Industrial Relations was established in 1996 by the Centre for Industrial Relations, Keele University, to provide an outlet for, and to stimulate an interest in, historical work in the field of industrial relations and the history of industrial relations thought. Content broadly covers the employment relationship and economic, social and political factors surrounding it - such as labour markets, union and employer policies and organization, the law, and gender and ethnicity. Articles with an explicit political dimension, particularly recognising divisions within the working class and within workers' organizations, will be encouraged, as will historical work on labour law.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Throughout the 1980s Mrs Thatcher dominated political life in the UK and Thatcherism became the shorthand for a series of political initiatives all over the world. Most accounts of these years have concentrated on the economics of free markets and privatization. This book takes a different stance through a detailed analysis of the responses of NALGO (The National and Local Government Officers Association) members, activists, leaders, and officials to the government's public sector reform and restructuring programme. Employees in health, local government, and education faced cuts in funding, compulsory competitive tendering, internal markets, and new management practices associated with HRM and TQM. Others in the gas, water, electricity, and transport industries faced wholesale privatization. This unique account of the period written from the evidence and perspective of those involved will be an important source for researchers, teachers, and practitioners in politics, industrial relations, public administration, and management concerned with the events and lessons of the 1980s.

First published in 1986, this book assesses the politics of the West German trade unions in the context of their larger role as major actors in the polity. By focusing on the historical realities of the labour movement both before and after 1945, the study explains the extent to which organized labour solidified and challenged the dominant structures of politics and authority. It examines the metalworkers' union, the construction workers' union, the printers' union and the chemical workers' union and shows how the industrial reality of each organisation helped shape its political outlook and strategic thinking. This book will be of particular interest to students of trade unions, industrial relations and political economy in West Germany.

First published in 1984. This book represents a major study of union responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Abjuring governmental or managerial outlooks, it argues that unions, as representatives of essential producer groups, would be central to the renegotiation of the economic world. The work also stresses the importance of situating union responses to the crisis within the socio-historical evolution of their political economies during the rise and decline of the post-war economic boom. The Social Democratic affiliation of unions in Britain, West Germany and Sweden make them particularly comparable. This title will be of interest to students of politics and economics.

First published in 1982, Unions, Change and Crisis represents the first detailed, comparative, historical and theoretically grounded study of two of the major trade union movements of Europe. It brings together the results of the first part of the first major study from Harvard University's Centre for European Studies. The book explores, first individually and then comparatively, the evolution of the French and Italian Union movements through the end of the 1970s. It will be of particular interest for students of trade unions, industrial relations and political economy in France and Italy, but also those interested in the comparative analysis of advanced industrial democracies more generally.

In the midst of the freezing winter of 1978-79, more than 2,000 strikes, infamously coined the "Winter of Discontent," erupted across Britain as workers rejected the then Labour Government's attempts to curtail wage increases with an incomes policy. Labour's subsequent electoral defeat at the hands of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher ushered in an era of unprecedented political, economic, and social change for Britain. A potent social myth also quickly developed around the Winter of Discontent, one where "bloody-minded" and "greedy" workers brought down a sympathetic government and supposedly invited the ravages of Thatcherism upon the British labour movement. 'The Winter of Discontent' provides a re-examination of this crucial series of events in British history by charting the construction of the myth of the Winter of Discontent. Highlighting key strikes and bringing forward the previously-ignored experiences of female, black, and Asian rank-and-file workers along-side local trade union leaders, the author places their experiences within a broader constellation of trade union, Labour Party, and Conservative Party changes in the 1970s, showing how striking workers' motivations become much more textured and complex than the "bloody-minded" or "greedy" labels imply. The author further illustrates that participants' memories represent a powerful force of "counter-memory," which for some participants, frame the Winter of Discontent as a positive and transformative series of events, especially for the growing number of female activists. Overall, this fascinating book illuminates the nuanced contours of myth, memory, and history of the Winter of Discontent.

"In this most significant contemporary study of Indonesian trade unions and the broader working class, Max Lane provides a concise and informed examination of the practical and ideological challenges of incipient labour organizations engaged in political and popular struggles in an underdeveloped nation. This detailed and highly informative book evokes similar historical and comparative struggles of exploited workers worldwide and is indispensable for students of labour movements in the Global South." --Immanuel Ness, Professor of Political Science, City University of New York, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class

This book explores the international leadership of the AFL-CIO, the UAW and UAW Local 600, the world's largest union local, and reveals that overall, working-class response to the Vietnam War mirrored that of the American society as a whole.

'Free trade' strategies have increasingly become a problem for the international labour movement. While trade unions in the North especially in manufacturing have supported free trade agreements to secure export markets for their companies, trade unions in the Global South oppose these agreements, since they often imply deindustrialisation. Especially the expansion of the free trade agenda into services, public procurement, investment, intellectual property rights as well as investor to state dispute settlement provisions are considered to be problematic. The purpose of this volume is to understand better these dynamics underlying 'free trade' policy-making in order to explore possibilities for transnational labour solidarity. Bringing together labour academics with trade union researchers and social movement activists, this volume moves from conceptual reflections about the impact of 'free trade' via the analysis of struggles around free trade agreements to considerations of concrete alternatives. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

This volume traces the themes of power, independence, and workers' control as they were practiced by Numsa. A number of small metal organizations, with at times antagonistic organizational and political strategies, were built in different ways and with different attitudes to the exiled liberation movements of the early 1980s. They eventually unified into one powerful organization. Forrest describes how workers' struggles built this power, and she scrutinizes the strategies used in the late 1980s, such as innovative bargaining strategies, to significantly improve the conditions of South Africa's impoverished workers. The volume then progresses to examine how Numsa used its power in an attempt to insert a workers' perspective into the political transition of the early 1990s. It explores the obstacles the union faced, such as the violence that erupted across the country, and its commonality and divergence from the politics of the liberation movements (chiefly the ANC).

In reviewing major issues concerning the history of British trade unions in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, this book discusses many controversial aspects of trade unions. It includes their economic impact (a cause of higher unemployment and lower productivity?) and their influence on government (unelected partners?). The book provides students with an accessible introduction to the recent history of British trade unionism.

This is the third volume on the history of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), covering the period 1945 to 1960, and starting with an extraordinary moment in its history. There were such high hopes with the election of Attlee’s Labour government, committed to a series of radical reforms, establishing the Welfare State and nationalising key sectors of the economy. These reforms seemed to offer unique opportunities to move forwards towards what Nye Bevan, the main architect of the NHS, saw as a ‘new world both at home and abroad’. Or did it? This volume explores the challenges as well as the opportunities for radical reform, as these played out between 1945 and 1960. There was renewed industrial unrest, with disputes in the docks and transport industries, despite the best efforts of the Labour Government to contain them. Much remained to be achieved in terms of equalities, and there were challenges when it came to calls for international solidarity in the Cold War context. But still, there had been major developments in terms of trade union education. The T&G had become a much more democratic organisation, and, overall, was a more powerful, progressive force by the end of this period. This volume explores issues with continuing relevance for the trade union and labour movement.

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'Free trade' strategies have increasingly become a problem for the international labour movement. While trade unions in the North especially in manufacturing have supported free trade agreements to secure export markets for their companies, trade unions in the Global South oppose these agreements, since they often imply deindustrialisation. Especially the expansion of the free trade agenda into services, public procurement, investment, intellectual property rights as well as investor to state dispute settlement provisions are considered to be problematic. The purpose of this volume is to understand better these dynamics underlying 'free trade' policy-making in order to explore possibilities for transnational labour solidarity. Bringing together labour academics with trade union researchers and social movement activists, this volume moves from conceptual reflections about the impact of 'free trade' via the analysis of struggles around free trade agreements to considerations of concrete alternatives. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Growing interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has focused attention on the relationship between businesses and key stakeholders, such as NGOs and local communities. Curiously, however, commentators on CSR rarely discuss the role of trade unions, while commentators on employment relations seldom engage with CSR. This situation is all the more remarkable since unions are a critically important social actor and have traditionally played a prominent role in defending the interests of one key stakeholder in the company, the employee.

Written by dedicated experts in their field, this book addresses a key gap in the literature on both CSR and employment relations, namely trade union policies towards CSR, as well as union engagement with particular CSR initiatives and the challenges they face in doing so. The research covers eleven European countries which, when taken together, constitute a representative sample of industrial relations structures across the continent.

This book will be essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners of international business, employment relations, public policy and CSR. Its foreword is written by Philippe Pochet and Maria Jepsen, Directors of the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels.

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'Early in my research, a friend with excellent knowledge of the United Auto Workers internal operations told me, "Don't give up. They are hiding something"...' It's 1990, and US labour is being outsourced to Mexico. Rumours of a violent confrontation at the Mexican Ford Assembly plant on January 8 reach the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in the US: nine employees had been shot by a group of drunken thugs and gangsters, in an act of political repression which changed the course of Mexican and US workers' rights forever. Rob McKenzie was working at the Ford Twin Cities Assembly plant in Minnesota when he heard of the attack. He didn't believe the official story, and began a years-long investigation to uncover the truth. His findings took him further than he expected - all the way to the doors of the CIA. Virtually unknown outside of Mexico, the full story of 'El Golpe', or 'The Coup', is a dark tale of political intrigue that still resonates today.

First published in 1968, the main purpose of this study is to present an account of the Russian Labour Movement, based mainly on original Russian sources. The Labour Movement differed greatly from those of the chief European countries from its inception to the final stage. This text investigates the main trends of the m; to analyse the origins and nature of soviets; and to describe the scope and character of the Russian Labour organization.

James 'Dongaree' Baird, a boilermaker in Harland and Wolff's shipyard, was one of hundreds of 'rotten Prods', and thousands of Catholics, driven from their place of work by loyalists in 1920. The expulsions marked the end of Belfast's 'two red years', distinguished by the massive engineering strike in 1919 and the municipal elections in 1920, in which Baird was elected to Belfast Corporation. Baird's case offers a rare insight into the city's brief radicalisation, the mentality of Protestant workers who opposed the partition of Ireland, and the reasons why loyalists targeted Labour as their most insidious enemy. As a leader of the expelled workers, Baird spoke to the Irish and British TUCs, but Irish Labour had no practical policy on the North and British trade unions feared that confronting loyalists would lose them members. Subsequently, Baird worked for the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union and the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, when he led the farm labourers of Waterford in an epic strike against wage cuts and was nearly elected to Dail Eireann. In 1927 he and his family emigrated to Brisbane, Queensland, where his daughters Nora and Helene were decorated by the Australian government for services to music in schools. A compelling account of a rotten Prod and a Labour hero.

Higher education is the site of an ongoing conflict. At the heart of this struggle are the precariously employed faculty 'contingents' who work without basic job security, living wages or benefits. Yet they have the incentive and, if organized, the power to shape the future of higher education. Power Despite Precarity is part history, part handbook and a wholly indispensable resource in this fight. Joe Berry and Helena Worthen outline the four historical periods that led to major transitions in the worklives of faculty of this sector. They then take a deep dive into the 30-year-long struggle by California State University lecturers to negotiate what is recognized as the best contract for contingents in the US. The authors ask: what is the role of universities in society? Whose interests should they serve? What are the necessary conditions for the exercise of academic freedom? Providing strategic insight for activists at every organizing level, they also tackle 'troublesome questions' around legality, union politics, academic freedom and how to recognize friends (and foes) in the struggle.

Labor at the turn of the Century; Open-shop drive; National Civic Federation; The church and labor; business unionism; Craft vs industrial unions; Women, Black and immigrant workers; AFL political policies; the Socialists; Western Federation of Miners; the American Labor Union, more.

Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World asks a series of pressing questions of teacher educators, teachers and teacher unions worldwide in this era of global capitalism. As governments around the world support austerity politics in the face of financial meltdowns, social inequalities, terrorist threats, climate catastrophe, wars and mass migrations, the book questions whether practitioners in teaching and teacher education are succumbing to pressures to dismantle their nation-state systems of education. The authors present a clearly argued case in Ireland for teachers and teacher educators organising to realise their moral and social responsibilities of free and fair schooling for all when it is most needed, as well as insisting on policy debates about a free publicly funded school system. At a time when teachers are feeling overwhelmed with workload and frustrated by the visible turning of events away from the historical record, the book emphasises the importance of practitioner research in informing decisions about a strategic and democratic way forward for education around the globe. Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World will be of great interest to academics and researchers in the field of education, as well as teacher educators, practitioners and policymakers.