Bøker i Trade Unions. Past, Present and Future-serien

Tells the story of how trade unions, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, have achieved a measure of success and how they remain today a weakened but still potent source of potential change in one of the most politically and economically troubled regions in the world.

This book describes and analyses the 2003 British Airways (BA) Customer Service Agents (CSA) 24-hour unofficial strike. It examines the lead up to the dispute, in which negotiations failed to reach an agreement before focusing on the dispute itself and its eventual resolution.

The service sector has not always received the attention it merits in industrial relations research when set against its enormous economic significance. One factor in this is certainly the highly diverse nature of services. Research attention has also lagged behind long-standing processes of transnationalization undertaken by service sector companies and the challenges these pose for policy and practice in the field of employment relations. This study by Stefan Rub and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer represents a pioneering effort to remedy this gap. Through six named company case studies, Rub and Platzer explore the scope and background for transnational employee relations conflicts and the mechanisms that have emerged to resolve and anticipate these, highlighting the complex relationships between employee representatives, management and trade unions. The choice of case studies aims to capture a broad range of service sector employment, in terms of both working conditions and employment relations arrangements. As well as covering a number of key sectors, the choice of home countries of the selected firms also aims to capture the impact of national influences for the main industrial relations models in Europe.Overall, the study offers insights into the complexities of the Europeanization of company-level industrial relations in a dynamic field now also confronted by the convulsions unleashed by the Eurozone crisis.

Based on the thorough examination of French archival sources, this book examines in detail two industries in which women formed the majority of the workforce in France between 1890 and 1914. The choice of the tobacco and hat industries is particularly relevant in the sense that the tobacco industry, unlike the hat industry, was a state monopoly in which women were in the majority and held meaningful responsibilities in unions at a time when women were generally in the minority and under-represented in the labour movement. The main aim of this comparison is to assess and qualify differences between both industries in terms of workforce and work organisation, trade unions' attitudes to women and women's membership and participation in order to get a better understanding of the factors that could have had an impact on female workers' attitude towards trade unions. By making women's presence more visible, therefore more apprehensible, this book contributes to a better understanding of the way in which women perceived themselves, and were perceived, as workers, women, union members and militants in French trade union history prior to 1914.

Drawing upon research from a variety of disciplines, the author examines the push toward privatisation in diverse national settings, its profound impact on organised labour, and the often innovative responses of workers and their unions in the affected industries.

With national industrial relations systems struggling to keep apace with the global and mobile nature of capital, the emergence of the European works council has caught the imagination of both practitioners and scholars of this institution in the last two decades. European works councils find themselves at the centre of an ever emerging European industrial relations landscape, offering employees of multinationals within the European Economic Area the opportunity to work together in regulating employment conditions. An in-depth empirical study of five European works councils, this book offers a unique look into factors which promote and hinder the development of solidarity amongst employees. With a sociological bent, this volume is a must for EWC delegates struggling to deal with geographical, cultural and historical factors that undermine relations between them.

In the context of China's growing influence over the global economy, its newly developed labour market and the subsequent series of industrial relations issues have captured much attention. However, research on industrial relations and labour problems in China is relatively underdeveloped. The classic three-party industrial relations model, which was developed for western economies, has been difficult to apply to China's circumstances. In light of this, this book reviews the relevant existing industrial relations theories and explores their applicability to China. It then proposes a new six-party taxonomy for the analysis of China's union system and industrial relations, taking into account distinctive industrial relations actors with 'Chinese characteristics' and their interrelationships at different social levels. This new taxonomy is then used to provide a broader picture of evolving industrial relations in China.

Takes a qualitative approach to examining the dynamics of collective bargaining at the firm level in democratic Chile by investigating the causes of variation in the bargaining outcomes of fifty-three unions in four firms in the banking, manufacturing, retail and telecommunications sectors.

The union local under study stands out as an exceptional case within the US context. By adopting a micro-social approach, the author reveals what drives union activism in an organizing local, beyond the rhetoric of union officials.

The continuing advance of globalization, together with deepening European integration, has increased the significance of the transnational level of trade union organization and action. This study offers a comprehensive overview of the development, structure, and policies of global and European trade union federations to serve as a reference work on all the key trade union movements operating globally and in Europe. It presents an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing these organizations and their strategic and policy responses. As a handbook, this volume provides extensive and systematically presented data on transnational sectoral trade union federations. Applying an analogous structure in the presentation of both global and European levels, the study features extensive organizational profiles, portraits, and overviews. This empirical material serves to reveal recent innovations in cross-border policy instruments and strategic approaches since the 1990s. The changing profiles of international trade unions - as measured against a set of functional criteria drawn from political science - and key developments in transnational trade union activity since the start of the new century are also investigated.

Explores the political trajectory of Latin America's most important contemporary labor movement. This book shows how Brazil's transitions - from military-authoritarian to liberal-democratic rule, from statist to free-market economic policies to internal democracy, political autonomy, and societal transformation.

The history of international free trade union organisations during the first two decades of the Cold War is an important but often neglected aspect of the development of post-war labour and liberalism. In this path-breaking book, Rodriguez Garcia fills this void in the historical literature by offering a comparative analysis of two cases, the European Regional Organisation (ERO) and the Inter-American Regional Workers' Organisation (ORIT), which were created in the early 1950s as regional branches of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The author employs the term 'labour liberalism' to describe their wide variety of functions. She argues that social democratic and reformist trade unions, which made up the bulk of ICFTU members, were fundamentally shaped by liberal values, even while calling for the active participation of organised labour in the planning and implementation of projects promoting liberal democracy and socio-economic development at home and abroad. By placing international free trade unionism centre stage, this book adds significantly to our understanding of post-war labour and liberalism.

After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Toronto. This book describes their labour, business, social and cultural history as they settled in their new home. It addresses fundamental issues that impacted both them and the city, including ethnic economic niching, unionization, urban proletarianization and migrants' entrepreneurship. In addressing these issues the book focuses on the role played by a specific economic sector in enabling immigrants to find their place in their new host society. More specifically, this study looks at the residential sector of the construction industry that, between the 1950s and the 1970s, represented a typical economic ethnic niche for newly arrived Italians. In fact, tens of thousands of Italian men found work in this sector as labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and cement finishers, while hundreds of others became contractors, subcontractors or small employers in the same industry. This book is about these real people. It gives voice to a community formed both by entrepreneurial subcontractors who created companies out of nothing and a large group of exploited workers who fought successfully for their rights. In this book you will find stories of inventiveness and hope as well as of oppression and despair. The purpose is to offer an original approach to issues arising from the economic and social history of twentieth-century mass migrations.

Moves beyond previous studies of SMU and union revitalization which have focussed on the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. In this book, the eleven chapters offer empirical and theoretical analyses of the impact of SMU on existing labour movements.

This book is a comparative analysis of policy making in Australian and British telecommunications and printing trade unions. It tests the validity of different models of union policy making and behaviour, whilst assessing the strength of the book's hypothesis, that informal micro-political influences inside unions affect union policy-making.

Over the past decade, European company-level employment regulation has emerged: European Works Councils (EWCs) and trade unions have begun to negotiate company-level collective agreements which have a far-reaching impact across borders on issues as diverse as company restructuring, health and safety, and profit-sharing. The negotiating parties have thus begun to fill the gap left by low levels of regulation and little formal structure, necessarily leading them to also bargain about the negotiating process itself. This study is the first to provide a detailed analysis of the process of negotiating European company-level agreements based on ten company case studies as well as a quantitative study of European company-level bargaining in the metalworking industry. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging order of European company-level industrial relations and the strategies and assessments of the key actors, with a particular focus on the emergence of a new and dynamic interplay between EWCs and trade unions at the national and European levels. The findings are also placed in the wider context of political science research into European integration and thus contribute to European governance debates that go beyond the employment and industrial relations field.

This book provides a history of twentieth-century labour in the British colony of Antigua and Barbuda. It contains documented evidence of class struggle between landowners and peasants both before and after the formal, legal introdudction of trade and labour unions in 1940. It shows that women were active, but hidden, in the recorded narrative.

This book analyses contemporary trends in radical unionism in Europe. It contains nine country case-studies that probe the limits and possibilities of trade union renewal and focus on radical activity. It assesses the degree to which we are witnessing the emergence of 'radical political unionism' as an alternative model of European trade unionism.

Until recently, there has been little concrete evidence linking the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to the US government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This book investigates this controversial and complicated early Cold War relationship.