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Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.
Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff’s now classic 1984 book What Do Unions Do? stimulated an enormous theoretical and empirical literature on the economic impact of trade unions. Trade unions continue to be a significant feature of many labor markets, particularly in developing countries, and issues of labor market regulations and labor institutions remain critically important to researchers and policy makers. The relations between unions and management can range between cooperation and conflict; unions have powerful offsetting wage and non-wage effects that economists and other social scientists have long debated. Do the benefits of unionism exceed the costs to the economy and society ...
Ladjevardi follows the rise and ebb of political development in Iran from 1906 to the recent past by looking at one aspect of political growth: the emergence of labor unions. Presenting a history of the labor movement in Iran, he begins with the genesis of the movement from 1906 to 1921 and then looks at the state of labor unions under Reza Shah from 1925 to 1941. During the 1940s polarization between the unions and the government increased, as did Soviet and British influence on the unions. From 1946 to 1953 Iran saw the rise and fall of government-controlled unions and, after 1953, workers without unions. After years of frustration and countless examples of contradiction between words and deeds, the workers and most of the politically aware populace became cynical about constitutional government, parliamentary elections, the promises of the ruling elite, and the friendship of the Western powers. Ladjevardi’s account of the labor movement in Iran leaves little doubt as to why the workers turned against them all: the monarchy, “Western democracy,” and the West itself.
This book analyses the crucial features of unionised labour markets. The models in the book refer to labour contracts between unions and management, but the method of analysis is also applicable to non-union labour markets where workers have some market power. In this book, Alison Booth, a researcher in the field, emphasises the connection between theoretical and empirical approaches to studying unionised labour markets. She also highlights the importance of taking into account institutional differences between countries and sectors when constructing models of the unionised labour market. While the focus of the book is on the US and British unionised labour markets, the models and analytical methods are applicable to other industrialised countries with appropriate modifications.
Using a common framework developed by a collaborative Harvard University and Brandeis University affiliated research team, this volume surveys and analyzes the strategic responses of national unions in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain to the last two decades of economic change. Also evaluated is the response of Sweden, long seen as the most successful variation of the European model, as well as EU level transnational unionism. The volume concludes with a reflection on new union positions and their implications, particularly on the question of what will happen to the "European model of society" as a consequence. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The 'Red International of Labour Unions' (RILU, Russian abbreviation Profintern) was a central instrument for the spreading of international communism during the inter-war period. This comprehensive and scholarly history of the organisation, based on extensive research in the former communist archives in Moscow and East Berlin, sheds significant light on the international trade union movement of the period. Tosstorff shows how the RILU began as a revolutionary alliance of syndicalists and communists in defiance of the social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions. His text presents a full account of the organisation’s main stages: the decline of the revolutionary wave after World War One, after which many syndicalists left, and others were integrated into the communist parties; the continuation of the RILU as an international communist apparatus; and its dissolution in 1936–7 as part of communism's popular front policy. First published in German as Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920-1937 by Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, in 2004.
Looking both at individual workers and the organizations that represent them, Reid shows how unions have, throughout the modern era, been a crucial element in British life, and that all governments have had to develop policies to deal with them.
From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in five, and just one in ten in the private sector. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have explained the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do shows the broad repercussions of labor's collapse for the American economy and polity. Organized labor was not just a minor player during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. For generations it was the core institution fighting for eco...
This comprehensive economic assessment of unions by two Harvard economists challenges the prevailing view of trade unions as monopolies whose main function is to raise their members' wages at the expense of the general public. Using data from individuals and business establishments, they demonstrate that in addition to raising wages, unions have significant non-wage effects on industrial life. Unionization, they argue, often leads to higher productivity, more stable work force and provides protection for vulnerable employees. They describe the role of unions as the collective voice of workers, which creates a vehicle of direct communication between workers and management.