At the height of the building boom in the 1970s, a remarkable campaign stopped billions of dollars worth of indiscriminate development that was turning Australian cities into concrete jungles. Enraging employers and politicians but delighting many in the wider community, the members of the NSW Builders Labourers' Federation risked their jobs to preserve buildings, bush and parkland. The direct impact of this green bans movement can be seen all over Sydney. Green Bans, Red Union documents the development of a union that took a stand. Apart from the green bans movement, union members also used industrial power to defend women's rights, gay rights and indigenous rights. In telling the colourful story that inspired many environmentalists and ordinary citizens - and gave the word 'green' an entirely new meaning - Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann open a window on a period when Australian workers led the world in innovative and stunningly effective forms of environmental protest. A new introduction reconsiders the impact of the now iconic green bans movement at a time when workers' organisations around the world are looking to fight back against overdevelopment and global warming more strongly than ever before.

The untold story of a British institution ‘Brilliant.’ Alan Johnson ‘Compelling.’ David Kynaston ‘The beer drinkers’ Bill Bryson.’ Times Literary Supplement Ferment Magazine’s Best Beer Book of the Year Pete Brown is a convivial guide on this journey through the intoxicating history of the working men’s clubs. From the movement’s founding by teetotaller social reformer the Reverend Henry Solly to the booze-soaked mid-century heyday, when more than 7 million Brits were members, this warm-hearted and entertaining book reveals how and why the clubs became the cornerstone of Britain’s social life – offering much more than cheap Federation Bitter and chicken in a basket. Often dismissed as relics of a bygone age – bastions of bigotry and racism – Brown reminds us that long before the days of Phoenix Nights, 3,000-seat venues routinely played host to stars like Shirley Bassey, Louis Armstrong, and the Bee Gees, offering entertainment for all the family, and close to home at that. Britain’s best-known comedians made reputations through a thick miasma of smoke, from Sunniside to Skegness. For a young man growing up in the pit town of Barnsley this was a radiant wonderland that transformed those who entered. Brown explores the clubs’ role in defining masculinity, community and class identity for generations of men in Britain’s industrial towns. They were, at their best, a vehicle for social mobility and self-improvement, run as cooperatives for working people by working people: an informal, community-owned pre-cursor to the Welfare State. As the movement approaches its 160th anniversary, this exuberant book brings to life the thrills and the spills of a cultural phenomenon that might still be rescued from irrelevance.

This open access book discusses transnational trade union cooperation in Europe - its forms, focuses, conditions, and obstacles. It provides an overview of existing trade union cooperation and includes detailed analyses of two specific questions: the debates on statutory minimum wages and the Posting of Workers Directive. Drawing on empirical research, the authors take a comparative approach, considering national industrial relations regimes as well as individual sectors. With the ongoing processes of integration in Europe, it has become increasingly important for unions to cooperate with regard to employers and EU institutions. The authors illustrate the interconnections between national and European industrial relations, and explore the process of European integration in labour markets. Illustrating the potential for and difficulties involved in deepening trade union cooperation across Europe, this work is a vital read for trade unionists, researchers and students interested in European trade unionism and labour markets.

The American public has increasingly heard that teacher unions and quality education are contradictory terms and that unions are responsible for the ???failure??? of public schools. Many critics of the unions would cheerfully channel public funds to largely nonunion private and parochial schools as ???free market??? alternatives.

The present volume, edited by friends of the teacher unions and featuring contributions by prominent education scholars as well as union activists, has a far more positive perspective on the achievements and value of teacher unions and our public education system. The collection does not avoid critical examination of the teacher unions, however. Moreover, taken as a whole, it speaks to the need for continuing reform and renovation within the unions themselves, and it affirms a need for innovation and competition within public education as a way of enhancing its quality.

Toward those ends, the volume first reviews the substantial contributions that teachers and their unions have made to the well being of their members and the education of students over more than a hundred years. It then explores collective bargaining as it affects reform and educational quality. It continues by examining the real-world outcomes of education in unionized environments; taking an inside look at a turn toward bipartisanship in the NEA??'s political and lobbying activities; and analyzing the unions??? recent record in shaping education legislation and policy. The book also examines teacher union activities in higher education; the innovative work of local ???reform??? unions; union support for education research and development; and the shape of a teacher unionismspecifically organized to promote educational quality. The volume concludes by tracing the development and current activities of international education associations as defenders???in both the developed and developing countries???of the teaching profession and of the rights of all children to a quality education.

This book is no mere reverie on a heroic union past. It is instead an exploration of past and present as prologues to the manifold possibilities for enhancing the unions??? contributions to quality public education.

The heart of any trade union is its reps and activists organising in the workplace. After years of membership decline across sectors, a renewed recognition of this essential fact is behind the 'turn to organising' in the union movement today. This turn to collective organising builds strength at a local as well as a national level, and also aids in mobilising around a wider range of political issues from campaigning against austerity to taking action for the environment. In recent years, this fusion of workplace organising and national campaigning has been exemplified by Europe's largest education trade union, the National Education Union (NEU). In Lessons in Organising, the authors bring together activist, academic and union official perspectives to assess the potential (and the limitations) of the 'turn to organising' and set out the case for a new transformative trade unionism for the 21st century.

This thought-provoking study argues for a restoration of the classical Marxist position linking the development process, class formation, and class capacities; in practical terms it argues for a restoration of strategies premised on a dialectical understanding of capitalism that sees the process of proletarianization as a capacity-enhancing one rather than a capacity-eroding one. Lembcke adopts Therborn's position that the fundamental power resource available to the working class is its capacity for unity through mutually supported and concerted practices, and that this capacity is rooted in the organizational structure. His work synthesizes three major areas of thought on the subject, including the work in logics of collective action (Offe and Wiesenthal), studies of class formation (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich) and class capacities (Therborn), and organizational studies done within the strategic choices framework (Cornfield).

This volume presents five studies on key dimensions of union-management relations. Topics examined include union representation, financial consequences of unionism, wage determination, workplace innovation and conflict resolution in unionized enterprises in North America. In addition, the volume features four papers that examine university degree programmes in human resource management and industrial relations and, in particular, the extent to which the programmes provide students with the skills and competencies currently in demand by employers.

Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they're trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writes about cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizing and health care reform, and political initiatives that might lessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor's past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book's insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform.

Teacher unions and their members have long stood as polarizing figures in a vast educational landscape. As in the Western films of the 1920s, policymakers, education reformers, and onlookers often assign union leaders and the teachers they represent either the white hats of heroes or the black hats of villains. Politicized efforts to reductively classify teacher unions as beneficial or dangerous have only served to obscure the extent to which labor militancy and teacher activism have become part and parcel of the American public school system and the primary mechanisms by which teachers' voices are heard - and heeded - in the policy arena. Teacher unions have grown in tandem with and in response to the expansion of the school bureaucracy and the acceleration of accountability reforms, and teachers' calls for recognition and reform are inseparable from broader movements for social change. Far more than either good or bad, teacher unions are the inevitable outgrowth of American public education as it stands today. This book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the state of modern teacher unions, the complex spaces they operate in, and the connections between militancy, activism, and school reform. Breaking free from the white hat/black hat dyad that has for so long colored the lenses we use to understand unions, the chapters of this book engage a set of fundamental questions: Where did the modern moment of militancy come from, and in what ways is it a continuation or a departure from the approaches of previous organized teachers?; What is at stake in modern expressions of militancy for teachers, communities, and schools?; Beyond the flashpoint of the walkout, what is the effect of teacher activism?

On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors-streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers-fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this with without police-and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. Chances are you've never heard of it. In Radical Seattle, Cal Winslow explains why. Winslow describes how Seattle's General Strike was actually the high point in a long process of early twentieth century socialist and working-class organization, when everyday people built a viable political infrastructure that seemed, to governments and corporate bosses, radical-even "Bolshevik." Drawing from original research, Winslow depicts a process that, in struggle, fused the celebrated itinerants of the West with the workers of a modern industrial city. But this book is not only an account of the heady days of February 1919, it is also about the making of a class capable of launching one of America's most gripping strikes-what E.P. Thompson once referred to as "the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the common people."

In the twentieth century's first decades, U.S. workers waged an epic struggle to achieve security through unions; simultaneously Americans came to interpret current events through newspaper photographs. Eyes on Labor brings these two revolutions together, revealing how news photography brought workers into the nation's mainstream. Carol Quirke focuses on images ignored by scholars but seen by millions of Americans in the news of the day. Part visual analysis, part labor and cultural history, Quirke analyzes over one hundred photographs: stereographs of the Uprising of 1877, tabloid photos of the 1919 strike wave, photo-essays in the nationally popular LIFE Magazine, and even photos taken by a union camera club. Quirke anchors her interpretations in a lively historical narrative that takes readers from Washington D.C. hearings, to small towns in Indiana and Pennsylvania, to local union halls and to New York City boardrooms. Illuminating why unions, employers, and news publishers vied to represent workers with the camera's eye, Eyes on Labor explores how Americans understood the complex and contradictory portrait of labor they produced.

Combating climate change will increasingly impact on production industries and the workers they employ as production changes and consumption is targeted. Yet research has largely ignored labour and its responses. This book brings together sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, economists, and representatives from international and local unions based in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Together they open up a new area of research: Environmental Labour Studies.

The authors ask what kind of environmental policies are unions in different countries and sectors developing. How do they aim to reconcile the protection of jobs with the protection of the environment? What are the forms of cooperation developing between trade unions and environmental movements, especially the so-called Red-Green alliances? Under what conditions are unions striving to create climate change policies that transcend the economic system? Where are they trying to find solutions that they see as possible within the present socio-economic conditions? What are the theoretical and practical implications of trade unions "Just Transition," and the problems and perspectives of "Green Jobs"? The authors also explore how food workers rights would contribute to low carbon agriculture, the role workers identities play in union climate change policies, and the difficulties of creating solidarity between unions across the global North and South.

Trade Unions in the Green Economy opens the climate change debate to academics and trade unionists from a range of disciplines in the fields of labour studies, environmental politics, environmental management, and climate change policy. It will also be useful for environmental organisations, trade unions, business, and politicians.

In 1938, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) sent communist union organizer Arthur "Slim" Evans to the smelter city of Trail, British Columbia, to establish Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Six years later the local was recognized as the legal representative of more than 5,000 workers at a smelter owned by the powerful Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada. But the union's fight for survival had only just begun. Smelter Wars unfolds that historic struggle, offering glimpses into the political, social, and cultural life of the semi-rural, single-industry community. Hindered by economic depression, two World Wars, and Cold War intolerance, Local 480 faced fierce corporate, media, and religious opposition at home. Ron Verzuh draws upon archival and periodical sources, including the mainstream and labour press, secret police records, and oral histories, to explore the CIO's complicated legacy in Trail as it battled a wide range of antagonists: a powerful employer, a company union, local conservative citizens, and Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) leadership. More than the history of a union, Smelter Wars is a cultural study of a community shaped by the dominance of a world-leading industrial juggernaut set on keeping the union drive at bay.

"Education for Changing Unions" presents a rich, stimulating, and provocative storehouse of practical and structured activities, ideas, and debate about union education. Written in a clear and accessible style, the authors have created a book to inspire working people and teachers in many settings and locations. All the exercises and activities have been widely tested. Six thematic threads tie the book together: community, democracy, equity, class consciousness, organization building, and the greater good. Evaluation, strategic planning, and survival for the long haul round out the discussion. See also the popular companion book, "Educating for a Change," Martin et al. (BTL, 1991).

Based on extensive original research, this book examines the challenges confronting trade unions in the global South, by focusing on trade union struggles in Sri Lanka under neo-liberal globalisation. It centres on movement politics of unions; explains union capacities to mobilise workers as a part of broad counter movement; and specifies worker struggles in Sri Lanka. The author identifies key dimensions of variation in the approaches taken by oppositional groupings, in particular unions, other labour organisations and the labour movement, and locates those variations in a larger theoretical context. Three case studies on trade unions in tea plantations, garment factories and among the nurses show how these theoretical dimensions operate in practice, and the consequences for the sort of opposition that is (and is not) created. The book contributes to the on-going debate on social movement unionism, and it also reveals their gaps in terms of addressing how class injustices are mediated through ethno-nationalist projects reproducing ethnic and gender hierarchies. It acknowledges the diversity of experiences and forms of resistance in the global South and critically engages with issues of gender, ethnicity and labour internationalism, providing a useful contribution to studies on South Asian Politics as well as Labour and Development Studies.

Roland Erne's view of transnational trade union networks challenges the assertion that no realistic prospect exists for remedying the European Union's democratic deficit that is, its domination by corporate interests and lack of a cohesive European people. His book describes the emergence of a European trade union movement that crosses national boundaries. Erne assesses national and EU-level trade union politics in two core areas: wage bargaining in the European Monetary Union and job protection during transnational corporate mergers and restructuring. The wage coordination policies of the European metal and construction workers' unions and the unions' responses in the ABB-Alstom Power and Alcan-Pechiney-Algroup merger cases, Erne finds, show that the activities of labor are not confined to the national level: labor's policies have undergone Europeanization. This cross-national borrowing of tactics is itself proof of the increasing integration of European states and societies.

European Unions is based on an exceptionally wide range of research methods, including statistical analysis, participant observation, and interviews with EU-level, national, and local trade unionists and works councilors. It also draws on a wide range of European, German, French, Italian, and Swiss union documents and a multilingual body of academic literature across several disciplines, including political science, sociology, and law. Erne's multilevel inquiry goes beyond country-by-country comparisons of national cases and his book will prove of great relevance to readers interested in the future of labor, social justice, and democracy in an increasingly integrated world."

Economic growth in Asia over the past half century has led to significant changes in societies, business organization and the nature of work. This has been accompanied by the rise in some countries of trade unions and also of employers' associations. This book explores the nature of employers' associations in the major countries of Asia. It considers how employers' associations have developed in recent decades, how changes in market structures and the profile of economies have affected employers' associations, how employers' associations deal with issues to do with pay and employment conditions, and how they interact with regulation and the state. The book shows how the differing political and institutional contexts of different countries, and different economic conditions, greatly affect the nature of employers' associations and also the wider context of labour markets and trade unions.

The 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis triggered dramatic changes in European labour relations. Unemployment and precariousness increased considerably. This was further exacerbated by austerity measures, leading to declining minimum wages and layoffs in the public sector. These structural changes varied considerably by country but collectively pose challenges to organized labour as they confront neoliberal restructuring. Concurrently, recent social struggles continue to develop with unemployed and precarious workers playing a major role as protest actors. Focusing on the triangular relationship of precariousness, trade unions and social movements, this book draws on a range of exciting cases, both comparative and country case studies, in order to understand how the shadow of the crisis still haunts organized labour in Europe. The chapters in this collection each offer a unique perspective on how the results of the crisis, in Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, are leading to a variety of new social movements as a consequence of increased precariousness and also how trade unions are attempting to respond.

In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not onlyupdates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.

British labour history has been one of the dominating areas of historical research in the last sixty years and this book, written in honour of Professor Chris Wrigley, offers a collection of essays written by leading British labour historians of that subject including Ken Brown, Malcolm Chase and Matthew Worley. It focuses upon trade unionism, the co-operative movement, the rise and fall of the Labour Party, and working-class lives, comparing British labour movements with those in Germany and examining the social and political labour activities of the Lansburys. There is, indeed, some important work connected with the cultural developments of the British labour movement, most obviously in the essay written by Matthew Worley on communism and Punk Rock. -- .

On 16th August 2012, thirty-four black mineworkers were gunned down by the police under the auspices of South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) in what has become known as the Marikana massacre. This attempt to drown independent working-class power in blood backfired and is now recognised as a turning point in the country's history. The Spirit of Marikana tells the story of the uncelebrated leaders at the world's three largest platinum mining companies who survived the barrage of state violence, intimidation, torture and murder which was being perpetrated during this tumultuous period. What began as a discussion about wage increases between two workers in the changing rooms at one mine became a rallying cry for economic freedom and basic dignity. This gripping ethnographic account is the first comprehensive study of this movement, revealing how seemingly ordinary people became heroic figures who transformed their workplace and their country.

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.

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.

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.